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

Re: Solution

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed. I get around this by sending all my communications through gmail.

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?

Ha ha ha ha

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

"I am not saying Microsoft has malicious intent by adding Cortana to Skype; the company could have good intentions."

I'll say it: Microsoft has malicious intent by adding Cortana to Skype.

The admission that they're parsing and mining your "private" conversations means they're no longer "private".

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."