To quell fears about its product-activation technology, Microsoft posted a Microsoft Product Activation bulletin on its Web site. The document explains how Product Activation works and dispels some common myths about the technology. Office XP, Visio 2002, and the upcoming Windows XP OS all feature Product Activation, which has caused an uproar with customers, mostly because of fears about privacy and Microsoft's poor job of communicating how Product Activation works. The bulletin points out that product activation is not the same as product registration. Unlike registration, the product-activation process is completely anonymous. As previously reported by WinInfo Daily UPDATE, a study from Fully Licensed, a German copy-protection company, confirmed that during the activation process the system sends only an anonymous installation ID to Microsoft. The company says that it uses a one-way mathematical algorithm, which runs on the PC, to create the Installation ID hardware code. Microsoft can't convert this code back to determine the underlying hardware information.