PSA: Microsoft Is Using Cortana To Read Your Private Skype Conversations (betanews.com)

BrianFagioli shares a report from BetaNews: With Cortana's in-context assistance, it's easier to keep your conversations going by having Cortana suggest useful information based on your chat, like restaurant options or movie reviews. And if you're in a time crunch? Cortana also suggests smart replies, allowing you to respond to any message quickly and easily -- without typing a thing," says The Skype Team. The team further says, "Cortana can also help you organize your day -- no need to leave your conversations. Cortana can detect when you're talking about scheduling events or things you have to do and will recommend setting up a reminder, which you will receive on all your devices that have Cortana enabled. So, whether you're talking about weekend plans or an important work appointment, nothing will slip through the cracks."

So, here's the deal, folks. In order for this magical "in-context" technology to work, Cortana is constantly reading your private conversations. If you use Skype on mobile to discuss private matters with your friends or family, Cortana is constantly analyzing what you type. Talking about secret business plans with a colleague? Yup, Microsoft's assistant is reading those too. Don't misunderstand -- I am not saying Microsoft has malicious intent by adding Cortana to Skype; the company could have good intentions. With that said, there is the potential for abuse. Microsoft could use Cortana's analysis to spy on you for things like advertising or worse, and that stinks. Is it really worth the risk to have smart replies and suggested calendar entries? I don't know about you, but I'd rather not have my Skype conversations read by Microsoft.

Comments

Cloud vs. Local

[DrYak]

None of the current crop of assistants (Cortana, Siri, Alexa, OkGoole!, or even just speech engines like Houndify and Dragon Dictate) does run locally except for extremely simple processing (like google detecting locally the "Ok, Google !" stanza, and only starts streaming the audio to the mothership afterwards).

The text commands and audio are transmitted to the company's cloud, and all further processing (full speech recognition when input is audio, then extracting the meaning/intention from the text, taking a decision, and suggesting actions) is entirely done there.

Means that for any kind of assistant to work, their company needs necessarily to have received all of your data (voice stream, chat log, etc.)

And due to the way these thing work (Deep Neural Nets need a big amount of data to train - basically replicating in silico the popular saying that you need to have been doing 10'000 hours of anything to be good at it) they NEED to be centralized on the cloud.
It's not possible to have the learning done locally on your smartphone : not only it lacks processing power (for the backpropagation in the neural net) but it also lacks the big masses of data to train on.

So it would NOT be possible to have your very own local copy of Cortana
(or at least not in learning mode. Maybe GPU acceleration could at least make possible to simply apply an already trained neural net depending on how big cortana is).

Re:Solution

[cheesybagel]

Quoting Wikipedia:
"Skype was the first peer-to-peer IP telephony network. The network contains three types of entities: supernodes, ordinary nodes, and the login server. Each client maintains a host cache with the IP address and port numbers of reachable supernodes. The Skype user directory is decentralized and distributed among the supernodes in the network.
Previously any client with good bandwidth, no restrictions due to firewall or network address translation (NAT), and adequate processing power could become a supernode. This placed an extra burden on those who connected to the Internet without NAT, as Skype used their computers and Internet connections as third parties for UDP hole punching (to directly connect two clients both behind NAT) or to completely relay other users' calls. In 2012, Microsoft altered the design of the network, and brought all supernodes under their control as hosted servers in data centres. Microsoft at the time defended the move, saying they "believe this approach has immediate performance, scalability and availability benefits for the hundreds of millions of users that make up the Skype community." At the time there was some concern regarding the privacy implications of the change, which appear to have been proven true with the revelation of the PRISM surveillance program in June 2013."