Its been quite sometime since users on BlackBerry Platform have been lobbying for a Skype application. Now, it has been granted to us, on OS 10.1. However, a new report by Ars Technica now suggests that our Skype message’s are far from private: Microsoft is often dipping into your communications.
Together with security researcher Ashkan Soltani, Ars had sent fresh web links across Skype, and found that half of the urls were actually accessed by a machine with an IP address belonging to Microsoft as they were transmitted through the internet. This means that Skype messages are sent across the web in such a way that allows Microsoft to study whatever we write or send in plaintext, and clearly, its (reading or accessing this information) is a rather common affair.
Matt Green, a professor specialized in the field of encryption at Johns Hopkins University, had told Ars:
“The problem right now is that there’s a mismatch between the privacy people expect and what Microsoft is actually delivering. Even if Microsoft is only scanning links for ‘good’ purposes, say detecting malicious URLs, this indicates that they can intercept some of your text messages. And that means they could potentially intercept a lot more of them.”
It is not clear on how these text is scrutinized by Microsoft. Are whole messages being scanned on Microsoft servers? Or is it that the end-user Skype application sending snippets to be checked? Or was there something more to this whole experiment?
Now, we know Microsoft wants to keep an eye on how their services are being used, but this messages, being private for many legitimate users, I don’t recall looking at a clause allowing them to do so… This makes me wonder, how about video or voice communications?
