QIP — Two Minutes Hate (Chat History on the Server)
QIP secretly stores Jabber chat history on its servers without user knowledge or consent, automatically logs users into qip.ru, and even continues saving history after the feature is supposedly disabled.
This week (or maybe I just started receiving notifications now) QIP launched some awful service they call MBlogi. The essence of this service is that status messages a user sets in QIP get posted to this Twitter-like "blog" as separate posts. And this happens completely without the user's knowledge. And without asking me whether I want to receive email notifications about new posts in these blogs left by my friends. Which in itself is a rather underhanded move and a display of disrespect toward users. On one hand, it's a privacy violation — I don't want my statuses appearing anywhere. On the other hand, it's effectively forcing an unwanted service on me.
Next. Yesterday, or even last night, the QIP.ru website, forum, and lead developer's blog were defaced. People on Habr are still actively discussing this. It was precisely thanks to this discussion that I learned that IT TURNS OUT QIP stores Jabber chat history on the server. Meanwhile, as a user of the program, I had no idea about this, I see no such settings in the "settings/history" section, and naturally nobody asked me whether I wanted to save my personal correspondence on the server.
Next. You can only delete history from the server one way — by selecting 20 messages at a time, in each individual contact. So if you like to chat a lot — deleting everything will now take a very long and painful time.
And QIP also has this option — it automatically logs you into the website. This means you are constantly logged into qip.ru, and anyone who sits down at your computer can open the history and read it, even if QIP is turned off and password-protected.
It appears that server-side history storage isn't mentioned in the program at all — you can only disable it on the website itself. At least that's what the menu header says. But here's the catch — after disabling history storage, it continues to be saved anyway...
