Pudding Media announced its new VoIP solution (voice over IP) called ThePudding.com - 03/10/07

Anyone will be able to use ThePudding.com's VoIP service for free to make calls in North America because the company intends to profit through the insertion of targeted advertising. Sounds reasonable, but there's a new twist.

According to the company's privacy policy, "Our technology detects spoken keywords during a conversation and brings you rich media, news and offers, related to the very topics you talk about during your calls. The conversation keywords are not kept in our system after they are processed, and the conversation can not be reconstructed."

Therein resides the risk. One of your employees or contractors might decide to use the VoIP service, thinking that by doing so they could save themselves or your business money. If the person discussed sensitive information, it could leak out.

Pudding Media says it won't store keywords, and you might decide to trust the company. But there already are known ways to potentially eavesdrop on voice over IP calls. Because this particular VoIP solution will, by design, be able to listen to conversations to discover keywords to use for targeted advertising, it stands to reason that the solution will have such capabilities built right into the voice over IP software. And if that's the case, listening in might become even easier for intruders.

Whether to allow the use of ThePudding.com is a decision you need to make before the service explodes into widespread use.

The overall point I'd like to make here is that if you hadn't learned about the service, you wouldn't even know that such a risk exists. So it's probably a good idea to read lots of news, follow the trends, research the overall computing industry to some extent, weigh the security impact of your findings on your environment, and take appropriate actions sooner rather than later.

While CCS respects their ingenuity and to some extent originality, I am sure you would not want your calls eavesdropped on! Here at CCS, as well as traditional voice over IP services, we have some customers who have specific security requirements and for one company security and confidentiality is key and we implemented a Closed-User-Group system with a 3DES VPN over the top ensuring complete integrity of their voice traffic. For more information on our VoIP Solutions please give us a call or click the link to read more on-line.