Skype's Less Than Subtle Nudges

I've been noticing that whenever I upgrade Skype, it presents very aggressive ways of grabbing customers for other services - and some of those services are not something anyone would want. Skype is a big program: it has a lot of users and is generally a trusted service for contacting friends via video chat, voice chat, and group instant messaging. Why then, does it taint itself with these nudges?

One example of the things it's offered is the Bing toolbar. Honestly, I think the only reason anyone would ever use Bing over Google is because Bing is set as the default on their computer. Or, in this case, because Skype took advantage of people who skip through installers and push Bing onto their system. Now, the majority of people who skip through installers are likely not tech savvy enough to try to figure out how to remove a bing toolbar – let alone change their homepage. The last time I updated Skype, it not only tried to get me to install bing toolbar, but also set msn.com as my homepage. Of course, this sort of aggressive marketing can only be classified as a “nudge” – anyone can uncheck those defaults, but really? Why even include those things with a Skype installation? They’re not even related. And if they have to be included, make NOT installing them the default. Setting msn.com to your homepage is relatively little damage, but there’s a good chance people would prefer their original home page to having msn.com as their homepage. Why would someone install Skype for the purpose of getting msn.com as their homepage and Bing as their default search engine? Is that really what Microsoft thinks Skype is for?

This aggressive marketing campaign to get people to use Microsoft products and make money advertising/force installing other people’s products took it, in my opinion, a step too far when they installed Sendori. About a year ago, I had assumed Skype’s installer was more trustworthy than some of those obscure programs which need the money from their advertising. I was wrong, and Skype installed a program called “Sendori” on my system. What Sendori does is it routes all of your traffic through its servers, in order to check what websites you are going on, to inform you whether it might be a malware site or not. Now, this seems “harmless”, if you ignore the privacy implications, and as such, not many internet searches came up with Sendori being malware when I first noticed I had it [the installations are not only forced upon you, but are also kept very well hidden until you notice a change in your system].

So, I had Sendori, and I saw that it was checking sites for malware – I decided that I didn’t need it, because I was smart enough to determine malicious sites, so I uninstalled it. Simple enough, right? Actually, when I uninstalled Sendori, I found myself unable to go on the internet at all. Of course, I decided that controlled internet was better than no internet, so I reinstalled Sendori, and my internet came back. I left Sendori there for a while, since I couldn’t find a solution to my problem.  It turns out that later I decided I would do my best to fix it, and I found some settings that Sendori changes upon being installed (to redirect your traffic through their server) and doesn’t change upon being uninstalled. Now, I’m a techy person, but it took me a while to get rid of this thing. Imagine someone who installed this unintentionally and didn’t know what they were doing. Essentially, they would be forced to leave Sendori on their computer or forfeit their internet privileges. To me, this seems like the very definition of malware, and I can’t understand why Skype would install this on my computer, or even offer it as an option - it seems like a grab at money by Microsoft, and in my eyes simultaneously tarnishes their reputation.