Network World Fusion - New tool tracks employee Internet, e-mail usage. Wondering whether your employees are working, or just sharing salacious personal e-mail with friends around the world (I know I am, wondering that is). Well Trisys has a new tool that makes spying on underlings a snap. Insight not only tracks where you go on the 'Net, and how long you spent at pamelaanderson.com, but also tracks the use of regular old office applications. Hope my boss never finds out about this piece of software.

Technology News from Wired News - Word Docs With Ears?.

A privacy group warned Wednesday that so-called "Web bugs" could track Microsoft Word documents as they are distributed among Internet users.

The Privacy Foundation, which was co-founded by the University of Denver, discovered it was possible to place privacy-sensitive document-tracking code in Word documents, email messages, and other HTML-aware applications.

CNET.com - News - Entertainment & Media - Internet contributes to rise of identity theft, FTC says .

Calls to the Federal Trade Commission's identify theft hotline have tripled in the past six months, and the Internet is partly to blame.

The FTC said today that it received an average of 1,000 calls per week to its Identity Theft hotline during the month of July. By comparison, the department received some 400 calls per week in March, said FTC attorney Helen Foster.

"We think that perpetrators who would hesitate to show up to a bank or apply for a credit card in person would find it much easier to do over the Internet," Foster said. "Applying for credit over the Internet is a faceless thing to do."

New York Times - free registration required Microsoft Programs Have Privacy Concern.

"These are not in any way specific to Microsoft or any other vendor, they are Internet issues," Schultze said. "This could happen on any Web-enabled application or on any vendor's operating system."

Smith agreed that any software -- not just Microsoft's -- that used automatic links to Web pages could be vulnerable to the same problem. On a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being the most severe privacy concern, the foundation rated the problem a 2.

Yahoo News - Group: Microsoft Programs Have Privacy Concern. Documents created with some Microsoft Corp. software can be rigged to ``phone home'' to another computer and report where and how often a document is read, a privacy organization says.

MS-NBC - Privacy expert finds issue with Word. A leading privacy expert released a report Wednesday suggesting a feature in Microsoft's Word product allows users of the word processing software to be tracked the same way Internet surfers are. Richard Smith, Chief Technology Officer of the Privacy Foundation, says so-called "Web Bug" tracking images can be embedded in Word documents. But Smith added he has no evidence the technique is currently being used by anyone, and Microsoft noted the issue equally impacts non-Microsoft products.

Well it might impact products that have the same feature set, such as loading graphics from remote WWW sites via a browser. Now if you have just a basic text editor (such as BBedit on the Mac) or word processor that's another story.