Privacy update — we now use SkypeWeb for opt-in
As published previously, Moodgeist publishes the mood messages of all your contacts to the world. We haven’t got too many bad reactions to that, but we realize that this may be undesirable in some situations, no matter how nicely we word it.
It’s always safer to go for opt in. So I walked down the street today going hmm… how can we have an opt-in for Moodgeist? If we only allow people to ping their own mood, this will never fly. And Skype at this time doesn’t provide many controls for developers to enable easily developing such tools… more on this below.
When suddently it dawned to me. We already have an opt-in which we can “leverage” (ahhhh I love inserting random corpspeak!) here. It’s off by default. And people who are interested in broadcasting themselves to the world turn it on.
It’s called SkypeWeb.
So we made an update. As of this moment, we capture moods of only those Skype Names who have SkypeWeb enabled.
SkypeWeb setting in client, after all, says “Allow my status to be shown on the web”. And the mood message is your status, of sorts. While not ideal, it’s certainly better than blindly sucking in all those mood messages. (In an ideal world, you could opt in and out of Moodgeist independently of SkypeWeb… maybe? Or is that even too granular?)
How does it work? It’s not really enforceable on client side so you’ll have to take my word for it. For each incoming ping, we query the SkypeWeb server to see if that Skype Name has opted in to SkypeWeb. (The text-based numeric status response documentation was available in SkypeWeb closed beta, but I can’t find it publicly at this time. But since we launched a new developer zone today, I believe that is where the docs will be up.)
… so anyway. We query SkypeWeb server to see if you’ve opted in. If yes, we capture and broadcast the mood. If not, there’s a new protocol response “200 SkypeWeb not enabled” that we return and don’t capture the mood.
So in short, if you don’t want your mood to show up on Moodgeist, make sure your SkypeWeb privacy setting is turned OFF and then Moodgeist won’t save or display your mood.
The old mood messages pinged over regardless of the SkypeWeb privacy setting will remain there, but as documented in the feeds, all the feeds are limited to 14 days of data, so they’ll be gone in 14 days.
This does not change the previous policy of not having personalized mood feeds until we figure out how to do explicit opt-in. SkypeWeb opt-in might be good enough to be included in the anonymized mood cloud, but not for personalized feeds that are connected to your identity and thus require that you could have yet stronger control over it.
There are two ways how I could imagine a service like Moodgeist could authenticate its users and provide personalized controls. Both need support from Skype, and both are impossible at this time.
First would be to use SkypeNet to make a bot which we could easily host and that would be the users’ gateway to “talk to the system”. The bot would have a secure channel to the Moodgeist backend and would let people to review and set their settings. At this time, an option to do it would be if we had a Windows machine sitting somewhere and running the bot, but we prefer to use *NIX hosting, and you can’t at this time run a bot like that on such a box.
Second would be to let the people authenticate with Skype Name onto the site as Stuart suggested a while ago. So that you could log on to Moodgeist with your Skype Name and could then manage your “Moodgeist profile”. At this time, Skype isn’t providing this service either, but it would certainly be useful for services like this.
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