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

Any LOVEINT ?

[klingens]

We all should know what LOVEINT is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
And it's not only NSA agents who use the tools of their job to check on all kinds of people they know. Cops to the same, to check if any new girlfriend has prior convictions or only arrests, etc. Data exists, so it will be used.
Are the employees of (in alphabetical order) Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Samsung, etc.who have access to Cortana, Siri, GMail, Bixbx,etc. databases doing the same? Are there even any safeguards against it?

Re:This is surprising

[schleimkeim]

And yet it is surprising to a lot of people.

Very Clever

[ytene]

Anyone who was paying attention at the time would have noticed that shortly after Microsoft acquired Skype, they made a fundamental change to the way the application operates.

In the original, pre-Microsoft world, when you made a connection to a counter-party for a Skype Call, the client would first check a dynamic, central registry to see if the counter-party could be identified and if they were on line. If these checks were positive, then your client would be given the connection handle [i.e. IP address] to establish a link with the counter-party, before the link to the central servers were dropped. This was a very efficient, effective use of a central directory model, which avoided overloading the central servers with traffic, and which guaranteed the best possible connection quality.

The key Microsoft change was to switch the clients such that all traffic is now run through central Microsoft Servers. Obviously, this is so that Microsoft can, if required, record your Skype conversations [you're not a terrorist, are you?] and pass them along to authorities who ask for them.

What Microsoft have done here is even smarter than that. They still want to better understand your conversations - likely, this time around, for advertising and marketing purposes - but by federating some of this activity to Cortana, they open the door for pushing some of the compute resources required down to your PC. As our machines become more powerful, the need for tools like Siri and Cortana to push audio clips to a cloud service for interpretation will be gradually reduced [OK, unlikely that we'll ever need to completely abandon cloud support]. But the key thing here is that Microsoft - who get to benefit from understanding what you're talking about by selling advertisements to third parties with greater claims of relevance - are opening up the door to using your hardware and electricity to do their hard work for them.

I wonder if they got the idea from this crypto-currency miners that were using browser-injected malware to perform the mining for them?

Re:Very Clever

[drinkypoo]

Anyone who was paying attention at the time would have noticed that shortly after Microsoft acquired Skype, they made a fundamental change to the way the application operates.

Anyone who was paying attention at the time would have noticed that shortly after the USDoJ found that under the leadership of Bill Gates, Microsoft was found guilty of abusing its monopoly position in basically every way possible, Gates stepped down from being in control of Microsoft and then founded the Gates Foundation, a massive tax dodge which leaves him in control of all of his money and on a mission of spreading western IP law to the rest of the world.

I have assumed that everything about Microsoft has been pure evil since that point. And lo, as Gates has been pushing Big Pharma's will around the globe, Microsoft has been spreading spyware. Supporting Big Pharma is also directly benefiting himself, since he has long had massive personal investments in Big Pharma; the foundation also profits from the same.

Secret conspiracies to harm the public are the norm, not the exception.

No sh*t. And?

[aussersterne]

I really don't get the crowd who's always on about security/privacy here. Sure, you don't want the inconvenience of stolen data. But as Equifax (latest in a long line) demonstrates, it's *going* to happen, and it doesn't require Skype or Google to be compromised. And as it happens more and more, the culture becomes more and more forgiving of individuals who may have been compromised. It's not a life-ending problem.

Meanwhile, the life efficiency benefits from having good data vacuuming and processing are incredible. They make you into Person+ in terms of getting things done and done quickly, and over time they accumulate.

On some story here the other day there were a bunch of people pushing a Debian phone whose big calling card was apparently that—thanks to being so completely locked down against data collection—that it's basically nothing more than a 1:1 communicator—you and whatever other person you're connected to. The big data services get nothing. The big selling point.

I just wouldn't be interested. I actively try to multiply the amount of data I'm providing to Google and others with the way I create and configure logins and use software, because it pays multiples and dividends in productivity and convenience. If someone came up with a phone that got an order of magnitude *more* of my behavioral, locational, and conversational data crunched by big services in order to leverage it all for customization/context/workflows, *that* is something I'd be interested in. Take my data. Make my life faster/better/more convenient.

I don't need someone to make secret the fact that I like show X and buy product Y and often drive to place Z. I need someone to spread the word to as many services as possible and help them to make use of this data to make my life better.