Recently in privacy Category
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.
There’s a bit of controversy in how Moogeist treats users’ mood messages. In short, it can be summarized as follows.
In Skype’s contact and authorization model, mood messages are displayed only to the contacts who you have “authorized” (or, in recent version, “exchanged contact details with”). Moodgeist circumvents this by displaying mood messages to the wide world, including people who you haven’t authorized.
Now… at first sight, this may seem like a pretty unsmart thing to do and actively violate the mandated privacy model. But we decided to go ahead with Moodgeist in its current format for the following main reasons. (UPDATE March 29: in addition to what’s said below, we now use SkypeWeb for opt in.)
