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Skype Plugs Android App Privacy Hole
alphadogg writes "Less than a week after confirming that a flaw in Skype for Android could leak sensitive user information, the Internet calling company issued an urgent update to fix the problem. Skype informed customers that 'After a period of developing and testing we have released a new version of the Skype for Android application onto the Android Market, containing a fix to the vulnerability reported to us. Please update to this version [1.0.0.983] as soon as possible in order to help protect your information.' Skype says it has had no reported examples of third-party apps misusing information from the Skype directory on Android devices, though is keeping an eye on things."
My Skype account was recently emptied. Only five euros, thankfully.
I emailed Skype and said there had been fraudulent calls and if they'd refund me.
Skype replied, to the effect that they do not refund losses and fraud is due to customer error (I kid you not).
I pointed out *I* had told *them* it was fraud. You don't, especially when customers money has gone missing, assume what the customer has told you is exactly and completely the problem, and inform him you don't do refunds!
The calls made were kinda strange, there were many calls, a lot of which were zero length in duration. That didn't quite look like plain fraud. Maybe there's a bug in their billing system, or even their calling system.
Basically Skype said it was fraud, because I told them it was, and they told me it was my fault, because they said it was.
I looked on the web, found similar stories - including ones where people had auto-recharge on, and their bank accounts had taken losses too - it wasn't just their Skype account was emptied.
The problem is that Skype is pre-paid. They benefit financially from fraud.
So here we see Skype jumping through hoops to close a customer data loss bug - but steadfastly refusing to refund customer losses from mysterious calls, without a care about the cause, and so without a care about the responsibility.
Sign out, then you can 'back' out of the app without it running in the background.
doesn't sound like the standard version to me
on my android, skype didn't come preinstalled, so i can install/remove it as i wish, and i can certainly make voip calls over my wifi.
sounds like you're talking about some cut down version your provider gave you, go complain with them, not skype.
"Proprietary", "enslaves", "guise of" - yeah right. How about taking a your medicine first?
First of all, FOSS is not a guarantee of absolute security. It can be better provided there are enough eyeballs on the problem, and people capable of coding their way around it, but it is NOT a guarantee.
Secondly, you're welcome to Ekiga. I also need to call landlines which it doesn't support, but I have Skype on Windows (which I may use once a month), on OSX (which I use all the time), on Linux, in handsets, on an iPhone and on Android until I got fed up with the data leakage that Android represents. And guess what? It Just Works.
You're welcome to your own Universe, just don't try to sell it as perfect because it isn't (and I have been using Linux since it came as Slackware on floppies).
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