Privacy concerns

I just downloaded abiword, and I have serious concerns about privacy.
In particular, abiword contains plugins for opening to web services
for translation. The one that raises the most concern is
babelfish.altavista.com. If I read their privacy policy, they make no
mention of what they will do with data sent to their website. There
is no reason to expect any level of privacy. If I read
babelfish.com's privacy policy it states:

(c) By submitting any Source Material(s) to the Site or using the
Services, You thereby represent and warrant that the owner of such
Source Material(s) has expressly granted to BabelFish.com(r) the
royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive right and license
to use, reproduce, translate, modify, adapt, publish, transmit, create
derivative works from, distribute, perform and display such Source
Material(s) in an electronic environment or any other medium now known
or later developed to the extent necessary to perform the Services
requested by You.

Which means babelfish can do anything they want with what is posted so
long as they say it is to make a better translation. That would
include posting it to the world to comment on how to improve the
translation, using it at technical conferences, etc.

Since the feature is readily available from the word processor, I
doubt most people even think to check the privacy policies, and expect
there information to be confidential. However, since corporations are
required by law to do whatever is best for making money, we can expect
unless there is an explicit privacy agreement, the information is
anything but private should the information have financial value!

Bill
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Received on Sun Oct 23 04:55:55 2005