By Sarah Left, 22 March 1999 00:20
NEWS Microsoft has released a patch for Windows 98, just weeks after it admitted that an anti-piracy feature in the operating system (OS) constitutes a breach of privacy. The OS generates a unique identity number for the PC through the online registration process. The number is then sent back to Microsoft, and could be used to determine the authorship of Word and Excel documents. However, the software was still sending the information even when requested not to, and Microsoft claimed that was down to a bug. It's now created a software patch that effectively disables the feature. In a statement on its Web site, the company claimed: "This hardware ID is only used by the software system, and is not used to keep any sort of record about customers. Nonetheless, there are hypothetical scenarios in which this number could be used to learn something about the user's system without his or her knowledge." Microsoft announced it is also "modifying the Windows 98 Registration Wizard feature in a subsequent service release of Windows 98 to ensure that hardware identification data is never created, let alone sent, as part of the registration process." The UK Data Protection Registrar, Elizabeth France, said she will be looking into the matter, possibly through Europe's Article 29 group, which governs data protection for all 15 EU countries. But she added that this will not weaken the US argument that self-regulation would deal effectively with data protection. "Is statutory law any better?" she mused. "We'd have a clearer means of action, but we wouldn't necessarily have spotted it any faster."
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