Skype and Microsoft man-in-the-middle chats to give targeted ads

70 points

12 years ago

TL;DR: I sent a friend a link to Kotaku that had the word pizza, and a Dominos ad showed up magically at the top of my browser. I disabled my settings not knowing these are enabled by default.

Long version: Today I was surfing Kotaku for kicks and started laughing as I was skipping through the YouTube video / article about using a Red Baron Pizza Coupon that was 17 years old. (Link: http://kotaku.com/man-uses-17-year-old-coupon-for-frozen-pizza-bundled-wi-1539878046).

I thought it was great, so I decided to use Skype to pass the word around. No more than 2 seconds after sending the link out I had a nice "Order Dominos Now!" ad at the top of my screen.

FYI: Skype and Microsoft enable targeted ads by DEFAULT. I don't mind having ads be presented to me from past traffic/links/urls/etc. However, I thought it was really uncool that they are man-in-the-middling my chats to give me "a better ad experience" by parsing/mining all my chats.

Link how to disable: https://support.skype.com/en/faq/FA140/how-do-i-manage-my-privacy-settings-in-skype-for-windows-desktop

As always Buyer Beware, and if you don't pay for the product - you ARE the product.

Happy Sunday! -Phrasz

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