Ages ago I noticed a bit of a “feature” on Skype and initially thought how cool it was.   It was when I was using skype for work both in the office on my office laptop and at home on my Apple Powerbook.  I would have conversations at home with other people and when I got into work the next day and looked at chat history I noticed all the previous night’s chat saved there.   Cool feature maybe, it makes your chat history available where ever you are (erm… just where does it save that history though?).

Then, I had both laptops at home (I had to do some PC only work) and once again I was chatting via Skype to collegues.  This time however, I had both laptops logged in and running Skype and I noticed that my conversation I was having on Skype on one laptop was being fully replicated on the other.  Neat idea I thought, although from then on I made sure I logged out of Skype at work at the end of each day; there would be nothing worse than chatting away at home while half the office is watching!

Infact, I then made it a point to log out and to make sure that Skype didn’t automatically log in me on start up on any machine.  Just picture the moment when you are busy moaning about work while at home only to find out everything you said has been duplicated and viewed by your collegues at work at the same time, in real time in fact!   So while I thought it was possibly more “quirky” than “neat”, I also saw it as a bit of a security risk too.

I then noticed the other day that other people have highlighted this too.  One bloke setup Skype on a friends PC, used this login details to show them how it worked, shutdown the computer, and off he went.  It was only six months later that both parties relised that each time that person turned on his computer it was automatically logging his friend into Skype and so now had a good six months worth of chat history that the other person had had unknown to him that everything was being duplicated.

So lesson to learn, log out of Skype when finished and untick the auto login.   Lession to learn for Skype, try and warn users if it detects you are logged in on multiple machines if they feel this feature is worth having.

Related Post