I also just discovered I can look up a profile of someone I don’t know (they’re neither a contact nor a friend), log out and back in, and Skype will start suggesting their contacts to me as potential contacts of my own. They don’t, but they know they just connected to you -> they can quickly figure out MergeMe Inc is talking with you also. Immediately after you accept their contact request, they start seeing suggestions that they might know the MergeMe Inc CEO. Furthermore, if they know about this new “feature,” they can make some smart deductions.įor example, you’re a mergers & acquisitions consultant. This means if you use Skype for anything where your contact list is sensitive (conference calls with clients, planning a protest over the skyrocketing price of kitty litter, coordinating your monthly meeting of people relax by knitting exciting underwear), your contacts can quite possibly deduce who other contacts are. This is a surprisingly serious privacy breach. It also offers your contacts as potential new contacts to everyone else in your contact book. People use social media with an expectation of public transparency, while many use Skype with an expectation of privacy.Īs of a couple of days ago, the new Skype tells other people how many contacts you have in common. But it could have very serious consequences, since people use Skype differently from those social platforms. It’s also the kind of thing we’re used to from Facebook and LinkedIn. I don’t usually post about computer security, but in this case, it seemed quite serious. Executives, VCs, journalists, researchers, and anyone who cares about the privacy of their contact list should read this. You can read my update on how Skype still exposes your contacts in problematic ways.Ī quick public service announcement for anyone who uses Skype. UPDATE: February 14, 2019: Since writing this article in late 2017, Microsoft seems to have made a change that makes it a bit harder to reverse engineer someone’s address book, but most of the problem remains.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |