Microsoft may be 'spying' their messages on Skype - Digital Journal

If

have expectations about the privacy of their communications on Skype, may want to reassess them. Microsoft seems to be ‘spying’ service messages for security reasons, according to Ars Technica.

The company regularly checks the content of messages sent through the service for signs of fraud, but what is done with the information from these checks – if they are stored indefinitely or destroyed – is unknown.

Similar findings were published by The H Security last week. «Skype uses an automated scan in IM to identify unwanted messages and addresses from websites that have previously been marked as spam, phishing or fraud,” said the spokesman of the company, James Blamey, by e-mail.

However, H Security said that Microsoft seems to leave untouched HTTP URLs when checking for HTTPS URLs. HTTPS URLs are usually linked to secure sites and not spam.

discovered by Ars Technica and the independent security researcher, Ashkan Soltani, raises questions about the privacy of communications on Skype.

is also a potential bomb for Microsoft, which has maintained a large marketing campaign – called ‘Scroogled “- which attacks the verification of the contents of Gmail messages by Google to target ads to readers of these communications webmail.

these recent findings mean is that Skype users can no longer wait for their calls and chats are private, said Solvani.

“The expectation was that what I write for someone, it is only for that person,” he told PCWorld. “However, this finding shows that Microsoft is able to monitor the conversation.”

Moreover, once the company collects data from the message, it is not clear what she does with them. It is also not known where the data is being collected. “If they are tracking URLs in chat, what else can they monitor? They can record all your conversations? “Said Solvani.

If this is the case, he said, Microsoft could be forced by the government to enable the monitoring of a user, if you suspect any irregularities.

“Until now, we had no data to show that Microsoft had this ability,” he said. “Now we have.”

Security Skype privacy was questioned earlier this year by a number of civil rights groups, including Frontier Foundation and Reporters without Borders.