- A glitch was sending some Skype instant messages to the wrong person.
For those who want to talk to friends and family without worrying about pesky phone bills, Skype is a godsend. Why bother with telephones when a hand internet connection works just as well?
Of course, when making those free calls and messages via Skype, most assume that the communication is private and not seen by anyone else.
However, it turns out this may not be true. The company confirmed on July 16 that a glitch was sending some Skype instant messages to the wrong person, so Skype might be yet another popular program that will be subject to some new application control guidelines.
In a company blog post, Skype said the problem was limited exclusively to when a session crashed while a user was sending an instant message.
In July, some users began complaining in forums about issues with the service experienced in June. Skype has now acknowledged the issue, and said in the blog post it was taking the necessary steps to fix the issue.
“Although we cannot determine precisely how many users may have been affected by this error, we believe the number is small given the very specific circumstances under which the error occurs,” the blog post said. “At Skype, our customer experience is paramount and we are working hard to release fixes for impacted clients within the next several days.”
This is not the first privacy issue to surface for Skype this year. In May, according to IDG, Skype said it was working on eliminating an outside program that allowed hackers to find out a user’s IP address without that person knowing about it.
What would you do if you found out your instant messages were being sent to the wrong person? Based on the two issues from the past four months, does Skype users need to implement more comprehensive layered security when using the program?
