At first, they said that Skype collects user data. Then the details came in: it’s not Skype who reads your computer’s BIOS, it’s a separate piece of code which is used under license by Skype. All in all, your motherboard serial number is being read by somebody other than you and Skype facilitates this.
Skype’s justification for gathering the data was that it was being used to physically identify which computer was being used and to protect against unlicensed or illegal use or software – which is basically a digital rights management technique used to assure that plug-ins were compatible with licensing agreements. But, Skype explained, since the technique was not performing well, the company removed the feature in an updated version of Skype for Windows, version 3.0.0.216, which was made available for download on the company’s Web site.
A clarification provided by Kurt Sauer for Networkworld, Skype’s chief security officer sheds more light into this subject.
According to Sauer: “One of the new features in Skype for Windows is the Extras Gallery. The Gallery is managed by a plug-in manager software framework developed by EasyBits Software and used under license. The EasyBits software includes a form of digital rights management functionality intended to protect commercial software, such as plug-ins, from illegal redistribution or unlicensed use.”
He continued: “To enforce these license agreements, the EasyBits framework attempts to uniquely identify what physical computer it’s running on. One way to do this identification is to simply read the serial number of the motherboard, which is often available through a public query to the BIOS.”
Sauer concludes, “It is quite normal to look at indicators that uniquely identify the platform and there is nothing secret about reading hardware parameters from the BIOS. The function calls to do this are public and are available to any software running on your computer. Of course, in line with our Privacy Agreement, Skype does not retrieve any of this data. It is only used by the EasyBits software to ensure that plug-in use complies with the appropriate license token or key.”
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