East-Tec Logo
Don't Let Unerased Skype History Lead Hackers To Your Conversations

Don't Let Unerased Skype History Lead Hackers To Your Conversations

2 min read

Share on

Skype did manage to let the world talk for free. I think it'd be hard to find a single PC user on the globe who doesn't use the service. But the free service can make us pay a heavy price if we don't pay proper attention to safeguarding our privacy.

Skype history is a feature that works very similarly to your browser history. It records all your conversations and calls so that you can view, save, or import the content later on. While a handy feature, Skype history poses a serious privacy issue too: The instant messages you send and receive aren't only stored in the chat area on the actual interface, but get saved locally on your hard drive too! And it's no secret for hackers where that folder is located on your PC, if they manage to access it.

This obviously is a privacy security concern we need to deal with. One solution, of course, is to turn off history altogether. But that might not be the preferred option for many of us. We often need to look up previous conversations to find particular details we just won't remember.

Another thing that could be done is manually removing history on a regular basis. But there are two problems with it:

1. Do you really want the hassle doing that brings? To do that, you would need to carefully remove each and every entry from a hard to reach folder without interfering with other Skype settings. Actually, it is not really recommended for general PC users to do that.

2. Thanks to Windows, even if you want to delete data from the OS, simple deletion just won't actually remove data from your PC! The files to be deleted get marked available for overwriting, but remain on your hard drive's free space until they actually get overwritten. So basically the "deleted" Skype conversations remain recoverable on your hard drive as long as they aren't overwritten. Obviously, we need a different solution.

Use east-tec Eraser to resolve this issue. It auto-detects and permanently removes contents of your Skype history, making sure that both stored and deleted entries are gone forever. This way you can easily control which entries you wish to keep or erase for good.

Note: when you erase Skype history with east-tec Eraser, the history will be gone both from your hard drive folder and also from your Skype interface window. If you wish to keep a particular conversation, import, or save its content before running the software.