Skype, which was
recently purchased by Microsoft Corp. (in $8.5 billion), said in an email that
"this is an ongoing, industry-wide issue faced by all peer-to-peer
software companies. We are committed to the safety and security of our
customers and we are taking measures to help protect them."
Following the
statement, Skype on Tuesday further said that the company is probing a new tool
that gathers a person's last known IP address which can be a potential privacy conceding
matter. On the very same day some instructions were also posted on Pastebin,
which highlighted the process through which a person's IP address could be exposed
without adding the targeted user as a contact by looking at the person's
general information and log files.
The company’s
policy got crystal clear when it recognized a research paper back in October last year, which disclosed
how the user's IP address can be determined without that user even knowing. The
said paper also revealed that more than half the time the IP address could be
accurately linked to sharing content using the famous BitTorrent file-sharing
protocol.
However, an IP
address is a vital piece of information that can be used to track the imprecise
location of a user along with the service provider, since the information is
not certainly precise, as the user could be on a VPN. Using an anonymizing
service like The
Onion Router (TOR), which routes a person's Internet traffic in a way that
is hard to trace can be a second option! It is significant to note that IP detects
a computer, not the person sitting behind it.
Security Experts
got admonition when they came to know that the encryption system integrated by Skype
in its peer-to-peer system to route data traffic is proprietary and not open
for scrutiny.
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