The U. S. Department of Energy has issued a bulletin that warns its employees about Windows XP and explains how to protect themselves from allowing it to inadvertently send their private information to Microsoft.

Why should anyone else be less worried about their privacy being compromised by Windows XP?

Office XP Error Reporting May Send Sensitive Documents to Microsoft

Microsoft Office XP and Internet Explorer version 5 and later are configured to request to send debugging information to Microsoft in the event of a program crash. The debugging information includes a memory dump which may contain all or part of the document being viewed or edited. This debug message potentially could contain sensitive, private information.

Sensitive or private information could inadvertently be sent to Microsoft. Some simple testing of the feature found document information in one message out of three.

SOLUTION: Apply the registry changes listed in this bulletin to disable the automatic sending of debugging information. If you are working with sensitive information and a program asks to send debugging information to Microsoft, you should click Don’t Send.

Microsoft seems to consider such compromises a feature of XP called “Corporate Error Reporting” and provides a full explanation of this feature and others like it on its web site. Here’s how it works in IE5.

Steve Bonisteel also wrote a piece about it for NewsBytes.