Protecting Your Privacy

Skype gives you two mechanisms for protecting your privacy:

• Your Skype profile: Information about yourself that you allow anyone on Skype to see. It can be jam-packed with information or contain barely anything.
• Your Privacy setting: This setting enables you to set who can directly call or chat with you.

In real life, anyone can find out where you live. All anyone needs to do is to look you up in a phone book, buy a mailing list, or find you through some publicly available information source. The fact that people happen to know you means that they can show up at your doorstep whenever they please. But if you live in a building with a doorman, visitors have to be announced, and you can give instructions to the doorman as to who is allowed to visit and who isn’t. Skype, through its profile and privacy settings, parallels this latter arrangement closely. The next two sections show how you can make it easy or difficult for people to find you based on your Skype profile, and how to assert control over who can start a call or chat with you based on your privacy settings.