Microsoft says it's prepared to hand over Skype users' data to Russia

"if required by law."

How's that different from any other company? Even "secure" companies like Fastmail and others comply if they receive a court order for information on specific users.

Looks like an attempt to capitalize on the recent events by implicitly saying Microsoft will share everything about every user in bulk. What a surprise.

Even a law in a corrupt, totalitarian country?

Or the UK?

Is that supposed to make us feel better? There was a time when Skype actually was secure, before they changed it to allow "legal intercept", but even after they did that they still refused to admit that they allow governments to have access to people's conversations.

I'll never forget reading in the damn New York Times a week before Snowden leaks came out about how secure Skype was for dissidents and journalists, and I only remember that because it pissed me off to much that mainstream media was so clueless about its security. They still thought Skype was P2P even then. But part of that blame goes to Microsoft for continuing the illusion that they have that kind of security, when they didn't. Even Vice was recommending the use of Skype for secure conversations against governments when the whole McAfee thing happened.

At the very least, I hope people know better now. Also, maybe it is just a little different with Skype. I don't know if anyone else considers allowing the interception of their users' private conversations as a "team sport" [1]. The fact that NSA was willing to pay billions [2] for a Skype eavesdrop solution may or may not have something to do with the fact that Microsoft threw $8.5 billion on the table for Skype, even though the second largest bid from Google only went up to $4 billion (remember when everyone was so confused over why Microsoft would pay that much for Skype?). Also very interesting that Microsoft had a "legal intercept" patent for Skype, before even bidding for it [3]. Who does that?

If we look at when Microsoft added Skype to PRISM we also see it happened just a month after they said they would acquire them (announced in May 2011, ready for PRISM in June 2011), but before the transaction was even official [4]. It's all a very "interesting" series of events, to say the least.

[1] - http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/11/microsoft-nsa-c...

[2] - http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/12/nsa_offers_billions_...

[3] - http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/microsoft-patent-...

[4] - http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c7/Prism_sli...

This shit is already a spyware (at least for Android, where it even has a permission to modify system settings). I had 40Mb of background data usage for a 5 day (in a roaming in India, that's why I have noticed) while I never switched to it.