My reaction was to cancel my Skype account altogether. If your associates have you in their contact book, someone can still use the same mechanism to figure out the connection. Important note: deleting your contact book isn’t enough. That suggests that they continue to keep that data - and probably call history and chat history as well - for use in “helpfully” building their social graph. Even deleted, Skype kept suggesting prior contacts to me. I went through and deleted some of my contacts by hand this morning (it takes forever… in a triumph of “good for Microsoft, bad for the user” they make it super easy for you to give them your social graph, and super hard for you to take it back). Of course, by that time, much damage will have been done. Microsoft’s support page says they’re considering changing this behavior someday. Suffice to say that you can get pretty specific.)
(This feature can be used for much more targeted research. (I can tell because those contacts have the same last name, physical resemblance, etc.) So this can be used by stalkers, bullies, harassers, and people who wish to research someone and learn who they know. 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.
#SKYPE FOR MAC NOT HAVE CONTACT UPDATE#
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.
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