#SKYPE PASSWORD#

I judged British English (because IвЂ™m British), so I listened to people who had their Microsoft device set to British English, and I had access to all of this from my home laptop with a simple username and password login.вЂќ Both username and password were emailed to new contractors in plaintext, he said, with the former following a simple schema and the latter being the same for every employee who joined in any given year. While the grader began by working in an office, he said the contractor that employed him вЂњafter a while allowed me to do it from home in Beijing. I think they just took my Chinese bank account details,вЂќ he told the Guardian. вЂњThere were no security measures, I donвЂ™t even remember them doing proper KYC on me.

Employee vetting was practically nonexistent, he added. Workers had no cybersecurity help to protect the data from criminal or state interference, and were even instructed to do the work using new Microsoft accounts all with the same password, for ease of management, the former contractor said.

The recordings, both deliberate and accidentally invoked activations of the voice assistant, as well as some Skype phone calls, were simply accessed by Microsoft workers through a web app running in GoogleвЂ™s Chrome browser, on their personal laptops, over the Chinese internet, according to the contractor. A Microsoft programme to transcribe and vet audio from Skype and Cortana, its voice assistant, ran for years with вЂњno security measuresвЂќ, according to a former contractor who says he reviewed thousands of potentially sensitive recordings on his personal laptop from his home in Beijing over the two years he worked for the company.