Skype has announced that TOM Online, owning the majority of shares of the Chinese society TOM-Skype, has monitored and stored part of the text messages sent by Skype users, without letting Skype know that.
Skype appologized after a report brought to the surface that the service is monitoring chat messages that contain political interest keywords, and stores them among millions of personal records of computer users. They could be accessed by anyone, including chinese authorities.
Jennifer Caukin, s Skype representant, who owns the minoritary share package of TOM-Skype, recognized the existence of this breach on TOM’s servers and said that this issue has been resolved.
Anyway, ea said that Skype will negociate with TOM’s representatives, after discovering that the Chinese firm modified the confidentiality policies, without their Skype’s approval, for storing some of the users’ messages.
Caukin said that he wasn’t surprised by the fact that the “Chinese authorities could monitor the communications in and out of the country”.
“Anyway, we’re preoccupied by the security issues being reported to us and we confirm that TOM had the capacity to solve the problem”, she said, adding that “the modifications linked with the storage and loading of the concersations are to be discussed with TOM representatives”.
Caukin also mentioned that Skype did admit publicly in 2006 that, to obey China’s laws, TOM had installed a text filter blocking certain keywords from the instalat chat message from TOM-Skype, without affecting the customers’ privacy, but she said that the policy has been changed.
“We found out last night that this practice has been changed, without us being noticed and without us agreeing, and this is the reason that we’re very worried for”, Caukin said.
TOM Group the mother company of TOM Online – the owner of the majority of shares from TOM-Skype, announced in an e-mail that they respect China’s laws.
“As a Chinese company, we obey the rules and laws of China, the place of our business. We have no other comment to make”, says a company press release.
The discussion started after a report of University of Toronto Citizen Lab showed that the messages between TOM-Skype users, and between Skype and TOM-Skype, are scanned for discovering the usage of keywords such as “Taiwan independence”, or “Falun Gong”, or the opposition towards the Comunist Party of China.
When these keywords are discovered, the messages and informations, along with the user names, are stored on a public access server, along with a code that could be used for unlocking the data, the report says.
Josh Silverman, Skype CEO, mentioned on the company blog that the report is not referring only to communications that use TOM’s software for messaging: “It doesn’t affect the communication when all the parties involved use the standard Skype software”, he said.
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