I got this chain letter with at least 1,000 names on it....Fellow AOL Subscribers, Here is a letter which was sent to me and several other AOL subscribersabout the new Version of American Online 4.0 which is going to come out thiswinter. With this new version of AOL anyone who works at AOL can access ANYfiles on your computers hard drive anytime while you are online. Thisincludes any financial information, email, pictures, programs, privateinformation, or any data on your harddrive. Please read the following letterfrom a now fired AOL employee who has sacrificed his job to warn all of usabout this horrible invasion of privacy. We must all work together to spreadthis information to EVERY America Online subscriber! If we all work togetherwe can FORCE America Online to rewrite their new 4.0 version without the"cookie program" that invades your privacy. After you read this letter remember to forward it to as many people on AOLas possible. Not just your friends and family but EVERYBODY. Do a search onthe member directory of a major city and forward it to EVERYONE. Our goal isto email EVERY LAST AOL MEMBER. Also remember to email AOL as well aboutthis! Lets FLOOD their email boxes as well and force them to rewrite the AOLprogram without this "cookie program" that invades our privacy. Of course wecannot be 100 percent sure that this AOL employees claim is totally true butif there is even a .001% chance it is true we must alert EVERY AOL user aboutthis! From a former AOL employee: I'll try and cut through the crap, and try to get to the point of this letter. I used to work for America Online, and would like to remain anonymous for that reason. I was laid off in early September, but I know exactly why I was laid off, which I will now explain: Since last December, I had been one of the many people assigned to design AOL 4.0 for Windows (AOL 4.0 beta, codenamed Casablanca). In the beginning, I was very proud of this task, until I found out the true cost of it. Things were going fine until about mid-February, when me and 2 of my colleagues started to suspect a problem, an unexplainable 'Privacy Invasion', with the new version. One of them, who is a master programmer, copied the finished portion of the new version (Then 'Build 52'), and took it home, and we spent nearly 2 weeks of sleepless nights examining and debugging the program, flipping it inside-out, and here is what we found. Unlike all previous versions of America Online, version 4.0 puts something in your hard drive called a 'cookie'. (AOL members click here for a definition). However, the cookie we found on Version 4.0 was far more treacherous than the simple internet cookie. How would you like somebody looking at your entire hard drive, snooping through any (yes, any) piece of information on your hard drive. It could also read your password and log in information and store it deep in the program code. Well, all previous versions, whether you like it or not, have done this to a certain extent, but only with files you downloaded. As me and my colleagues discovered, with the new version, anytime you are signed on to AOL, any top aol executive, any aol worker, who has been sworn to secrecy regarding this feature, can go into your hard drive and retrieve any piece of information that they so desire. Billing, download records, e-mail, directories, personal documents, programs, financial information, scanned images, etc ... Better start keeping all those pictures on a floppy disk! This is a totally disgusting violation of our rights, and your right to know as well. Since this is undoubtably 'Top Secret' information that I am revealing, my life at AOL is pretty much over. After discovering this information, we started to inform a few other workers at America Online, so that we could get a large enough crew to stop this from happening to the millions of unfortunate and unsuspecting America Online members. This was in early August. One month later, all three of us were unemployed. We got together, and figured there was something we had to do to let the public know. Unemployed, with one of us going through a divorce (me) and another who is about to undergo treatment for Cancer, our combined financial situation is not currently enough to release any sort or article. We attepted to create a web page on three different servers containing in-depth information on AOL 4.0, but all three were taken down within 2 days. We were running very low on time (4.0 is released early this winter), so we figured our last hope to reveal this madness before it effects the people was starting something similar to a chain letter, this letter you are reading. Please do the following, to help us expose AOL for who they really are, and to help us and yourself recieve personal gratification for taking a stand for our freedom: 1. Forward this letter to as many people as you can (not just friends and family, as many as you can!) 2. Tell people who aren't on America Online in person, especially important people (Private Investigators, Government workers, City Council) 3. If the information about the new version isn't exposed by the time aol is released early this winter, for your own protection, DON'T DOWNLOAD AOL 4.0 UNDER ANY CONDITION !!! Thank you for reading and examining this information. Me and my colleagues hope that you will help us do the right thing in this situation. Enjoy America Online (just kidding!). Regards, A former AOL employee