Microsoft are Listening to your Skype Conversations (Seriously Social News May 17th, 2013)

http://iag.me/podcasts/seriously-social-news-22/ Microsoft bought Skype back in May 2011 for $8.5 billion and has been heavily integrating it into Windows 8 and other services such as Outlook.com. Not everything is so rosy though as revealed by UK Security blog "The H". It has been found that sending a link via Skype chat can be intercepted by Skype supposedly on the basis of scanning for spam. Skype responded to the findings by pointing to their data protection policy which states that Skype may use "automated scanning within Instant Messages and SMS to (a) identify suspected spam and/or (b) identify URLs that have been previously flagged as spam, fraud, or phishing links.". Some may argue that this is very similar to the way Google scans GMail messages in order to provide targetted ads but the difference is that historically Skype chat was supposed to be secure and encrypted. I think the answer to that one is that it is not secure any more.