> You do realize that the scanning is meant for checking the links for malware, redirection and metadata for previews. Which popular chat service doesn't do thi

> You do realize that the scanning is meant for checking the links for malware, redirection and metadata for previews. Which popular chat service doesn't do this? Paste a link into Facebook, Google+, Gchat and all are likely to do the same or the least passively scan it against a list of known malwares. The first time I noticed Microsoft was doing it, was not long after the skype purchase and moving to a centralized comm model; gchat for sure was not at the time, and decentralized skype wasn't either. Furthermore, following that chat, Bing started scanning a server that was not linked from anywhere on the internet. I find the correlation more than suspicious. Anecdotal, but skype ads on a friend's computer tend to reflect chat subjects - which is NOT just "malware protection". I wouldn't know - I only use it with an iPhone 4 and its old adless client when I do. > I thought it was common sense by now that if you have something sensitive to share do NOT use a cloud based chat or repository! I thought it would be too. But I keep meeting people who have the general idea that "well, all my email is already on gmail/the cloud, and it's working ok - so I guess all cloud services are trustworthy". And it seems for this kind of people, until their own gmail gets hacked, nothing gets the message through - and sometimes even if their own gmail gets hacked. I was a consultant for one (rather successful) company who keeps all their precious data on AWS (a few TB of it), without even a local copy, and I couldn't convince them that yes, even though Amazon probably has better IT and security than they do, it's still a SPOF, and if anyone (e.g. hacker) changed their data-at-rest, they would be none the wiser. Common sense is not all that common.