Hack76.Manage (or Delete) Your Skype Public Profile

Hack 76. Manage (or Delete) Your Skype Public Profile

Having a comprehensive online public profile for Skype can be a great way for people to find you, but you should be careful in terms of what you make public and what you keep private.

Works with: Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X versions of Skype.

Your public profile is how you advertise whom and what you are to the Skype community. As such, it can be a great resource. But like any resource, it should be managed.

Before discussing how to manage (or delete) your Skype profile, it's worth pausing a moment or two to understand how Skype maintains your profile. Without such an understanding, you cannot manage your profile intelligently.

Your profile is stored on the Skype network. This is good in the sense that your profile follows you wherever you go: fly halfway around the world and log onto Skype, and there it will be; the same profile you last saw at home.

But because of how Skype's peer-to-peer technology works, your profile typically persists for only around 72 hours following your last use of Skype. That is, after 72 hours of being offline, someone who is searching for you by means of the profile you stored on the Skype network might not find you.

Another thing to bear in mind is that Skype names persist forever; that is, names are never recycled or reused. So, in some sense, you never can delete a Skype name. Later in this hack, I will show you how to get as close as possible to eradicating a Skype account from the face of the Earth!

9.4.1. Manage Your Profile

You manage your profile through the My Profile dialog (select Skype File My Profile…on Windows, Skype File Your Personal Profile…on Linux, or Skype Account My Profile…on Mac OS X; managing your profile is not available on Pocket PC); see Figure 9-6.

When creating and later managing your Skype profile, you should think carefully about the following:

• All profile information is optional.

• Your profile is what you make public to the Skype community. Be careful not to give too much away. Everything in your profile, except your email address, is available for any Skype user to see. However, even your email address can be used in a Skype user search (in which case, the person searching must clearly already know it).

  Figure 9-6. Updating your Skype profile

  

• Your profile follows you wherever you go, but your avatar picture will not.

• Some people don't accept calls or chat from anyone who doesn't have a fairly complete profile. The rationale is that if you're willing to share details about yourself, you're less likely to be a mischief-maker and people can find you more easily.

• The information you put in your profile doesn't have to be true (which negates the preceding point to some degree), as it's not checked or validated by Skype, or by anyone else.

• All profile data is signed digitally, to make it impossible to tamper with it.

9.4.2. Delete Your Profile

Because your profile as stored on the Skype network typically expires after 72 hours of being offline, one option to "delete" your Skype profile is simply to let it expire and die a natural death. However, as Skype is a closed source application and its policy of how profile data is stored is subject to change, how can you really know when, and if, all your profile data was deleted? For this reason, and for peace of mind, I recommend overwriting your entire profile with junk data and updating your online profile.

9.4.3. Hacking the Hack (Windows Only)

To help you to delete (overwrite) your Skype profile with a simple click of the mouse, you can use the following keystroke sequence. Note that this keystroke sequence uses the VBScript drive_skype.vbs, which you'll need to have on your machine and on your path (see "Accelerate Skype Using Your Keyboard" [Hack #44] for details). Simply make the following command the target of a shortcut, or run it from the run line (select Start Run…), and your profile will be history in a few heartbeats! This command might be particularly useful if you have, or as part of your job are responsible for, several Skype names, and all of them need to have their profiles zapped. If you dont want to enter this command by hand and would prefer to use cut and paste, you can download the command as a text file, delete_profile.txt, from the book's web site, http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/SkypeHacks/index.html.

 drive_skype.vbs "^+S|%(FM)|{DEL}|{TAB}|{DEL}|{TAB}|{DEL}|{TAB}|{DEL}|  {TAB}|{DEL}|{TAB}|{DEL}|{TAB}|{DEL}|{TAB}|{DEL}|{TAB}|{DEL}|{TAB}| {DEL}|{TAB}|{DEL}|{TAB}|{DEL}|{TAB}|{DEL}|{TAB}|^A{DEL}|{TAB}{TAB}| {ENTER}|{TAB}|{DEL}|{TAB}|{ENTER}"