The Beetle recently received this and thought it might
be of interest to the travellers out there who use hotmail. The Beetle
has long given up on Hotmail as it was inundating her with embarrassing
amounts (and content!) of porn e-mails.

If you have a hotmail account in your name, this might
interest you – hotmail has changed the privacy settings on each of it's
user accounts so they now have permission to share all user details with
other companies. All of their users have effectively just opted in to
receive yet more Spam, without even being informed.

There's a couple of checkboxes in hotmail's 'options'
section under 'personal profile' labelled 'Share my e-mail
address' and 'Share my other registration information' which
have been automatically checked regardless of their previous setting without
even informing the owner of the account. It's incongruous with their
privacy policy, but by now the user details could have been sold. Interesting
direct marketing tactic. And while most of the hotmail site is fairly
accessible, you can't access the personal profile page to revert these
settings with anything other than a Microsoft browser.