As the past few years have taught us, there are many privacy and security issues related to the Internet. The lesson of the Melissa and ILOVEYOU viruses is that there are costs and annoyances of being connected to the Internet. A slight variation on that lesson: Just as the Web allows everyone to be a publisher, it also allows a document to be a secret agent, snooping on those who read it.
Let’s talk about Web bugs and Microsoft Word, the software that lawyers use more than any other. Bugs are Web links hidden in documents that allow the creator of the bug surreptitiously to note when a document has been read and from what location, and when it is passed along to others. Advertisers have long used these hidden devices on Web pages, but until late August, it was not widely known that Word documents could contain them, too. For that we can thank the Privacy Foundation, which issued an advisory warning people of this hidden capability of Word.
