Late last month I wrote an article on using vCards in Outlook.
A reader had the following question:
I have created the v-card repeatedly, but no matter what I do, Outlook (2003) recognizes that it's "me" making the card, and always includes all my personal information under the Activities tab. So whoever receives the v-card is able to look at my contacts, emails, calendar, etc. How can I remove that?
I must admit... the email SCARED me ... had I accidentally advised you to send all kinds of personal information out. Luckily for me ...
The person you send the vcard to will not see the activities you are seeing as the activities are NOT being sent with the card.
Instead ... the Activites page is being created on the users computer based on items it find on that users computer related to the contact.
When you are opening the vCard on your computer, Outlook is finding all the activities that relate to you in your Outlook. When the recipient opens it, they will only see any activities that they already have in their Outlook related to you.
You can verify for yourself that there are no activities being sent with your vCard by saving it to harddisk and then opening it with Notepad.
Thursday, June 12, 2008
vCard Follow-Up: Do vCards expose information about your activities?
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2 comments:
It only pulls activities from the emails it finds on the person's computer, and only displays those messages related to them. Ok, I got that part...
But what if someone had a copy of your entire email backup and/or had your email account configured on their machine as well? Does that mean they would be able to see EVERYTHING?
What about keeping contact information private in general? For example, you send an email to a customer with cc: several employees or peers. All of their contact information in their Outlook Contact card (cell #, address, etc. etc.) are available to the customer who receives the email by right-clicking on the name and viewing Outlook properties. Is there some way to avoid this - to have all of that information in the contact card for my reference - but set Outlook NOT to include it with the email address?
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