There’s too much evidence that new owners Microsoft are monitoring conversations.
And doing what exactly? Many different forms of communications can be monitored, tapped, or recorded. And sometimes you might have to worry about this… but first, you should ask who is doing it, and what they would care about.
If it’s Microsoft and/or governments, to be honest I feel relatively safe in most of my conversations, and I don’t see why CFAR graduates wouldn’t feel the same. People planning terrorist attacks would probably have a different opinion.
There’s two instances of snooping that I would worry about, and I don’t think they’re likely to happen through Skype:
Collecting personal data for various mass attacks (notably, spam). But just in case, don’t send your credit card information over Skype, that’s generally a good habit to have.
Information about my personal life being exposed to people I know. I’m having a hard time imagining the mechanism by which even my acquaintances working at Microsoft would end up having access to my Skype conversations.
I also feel somewhat safer having voice conversations than text-based ones, because these are harder to store, and harder to search through automatically. Neither of these would be an obstacle to a serious adversary, though.
Your security conscious Fortune-500 employer, and possibly CFAR as well, might also be worried about corporate secrets being stolen; but of the two, at least the latter doesn’t appear to be in direct competition with Microsoft, so that’s okay.
If it’s Microsoft and/or governments, to be honest I feel relatively safe in most of my conversations, and I don’t see why CFAR graduates wouldn’t feel the same. People planning terrorist attacks would probably have a different opinion.
Wikileaks came out of an enviroment of smart geeks who wanted to hack the political system.
It’s a possibility that you have smart CFAR graduates thinking: “Our politicians are really irrational. I could do clever hack XY and change politics for the better.”
But it’s not only about protecting yourself, it’s also about protecting other people. A bunch of people who use LessWrong do so under nicknames.
Some might be interested into doing something that their government doesn’t like. They might want to expose political corruption and have a need for their anonymity.
If you tell another person who’s real life persona connects to which LessWrong nickname over Skype and that Skype conversation get’s monitored by the government you just have given the government information that might help the government to track down the LessWrong person who engages in exposing political corruption.
You have to assume that every word that you communicate without encryption get’s stored forever on government servers. If you know have a conversation that links someone real world identity to someone nickname and in five years the political winds changed a bit and that person feels the need to engage in political action against their government you don’t want to be the person who made them vunerable by exposing their identity.
I personally don’t value my own anonymity but I don’t want to compromise the anonymity of other people.
I also feel somewhat safer having voice conversations than text-based ones, because these are harder to store, and harder to search through automatically.
Voice-to-text translation isn’t so bad and will become better in the coming years. You can assume your conversation stored by your government so that even if present day voice-to-text translation is too crapy that will change and the government will be able to rerun the translation.
And doing what exactly? Many different forms of communications can be monitored, tapped, or recorded. And sometimes you might have to worry about this… but first, you should ask who is doing it, and what they would care about.
If your jurisdiction’s law enforcement has access to your conversations, there’s this issue.
I guess, if you don’t particularly care whether or not your messages are being read, then it won’t matter too much to you. But if you do care—and some people care a lot—then Skype is very much the wrong platform to use. It might be the right platform to use if you particularly want Microsoft to read your message, for some reason.
And doing what exactly? Many different forms of communications can be monitored, tapped, or recorded. And sometimes you might have to worry about this… but first, you should ask who is doing it, and what they would care about.
If it’s Microsoft and/or governments, to be honest I feel relatively safe in most of my conversations, and I don’t see why CFAR graduates wouldn’t feel the same. People planning terrorist attacks would probably have a different opinion.
There’s two instances of snooping that I would worry about, and I don’t think they’re likely to happen through Skype:
Collecting personal data for various mass attacks (notably, spam). But just in case, don’t send your credit card information over Skype, that’s generally a good habit to have.
Information about my personal life being exposed to people I know. I’m having a hard time imagining the mechanism by which even my acquaintances working at Microsoft would end up having access to my Skype conversations.
I also feel somewhat safer having voice conversations than text-based ones, because these are harder to store, and harder to search through automatically. Neither of these would be an obstacle to a serious adversary, though.
Your security conscious Fortune-500 employer, and possibly CFAR as well, might also be worried about corporate secrets being stolen; but of the two, at least the latter doesn’t appear to be in direct competition with Microsoft, so that’s okay.
Wikileaks came out of an enviroment of smart geeks who wanted to hack the political system.
It’s a possibility that you have smart CFAR graduates thinking: “Our politicians are really irrational. I could do clever hack XY and change politics for the better.”
But it’s not only about protecting yourself, it’s also about protecting other people. A bunch of people who use LessWrong do so under nicknames. Some might be interested into doing something that their government doesn’t like. They might want to expose political corruption and have a need for their anonymity.
If you tell another person who’s real life persona connects to which LessWrong nickname over Skype and that Skype conversation get’s monitored by the government you just have given the government information that might help the government to track down the LessWrong person who engages in exposing political corruption.
You have to assume that every word that you communicate without encryption get’s stored forever on government servers. If you know have a conversation that links someone real world identity to someone nickname and in five years the political winds changed a bit and that person feels the need to engage in political action against their government you don’t want to be the person who made them vunerable by exposing their identity.
I personally don’t value my own anonymity but I don’t want to compromise the anonymity of other people.
Voice-to-text translation isn’t so bad and will become better in the coming years. You can assume your conversation stored by your government so that even if present day voice-to-text translation is too crapy that will change and the government will be able to rerun the translation.
Also see http://www.overcomingbias.com/2013/05/us-record-all-calls.html and the comments.
If your jurisdiction’s law enforcement has access to your conversations, there’s this issue.
Visiting any https links that you might include in your messages, for a start.
I guess, if you don’t particularly care whether or not your messages are being read, then it won’t matter too much to you. But if you do care—and some people care a lot—then Skype is very much the wrong platform to use. It might be the right platform to use if you particularly want Microsoft to read your message, for some reason.