Monday, 6 October 2008

Chinese Government Monitors Skype Chats

Skype, the Internet communications service owned by eBay, recently accused its joint venture partner in China of keeping it in the dark about a censorship programme that involved the monitoring of politically sensitive terms on the service.

In a blog post to the eBay subsidiary's corporate blog, Skype President Josh Silverman said his company had no idea that the Tom-Skype software, distributed to Skype users in China, was logging chat messages and storing them on a publicly accessible server. "It was our understanding that it was not Tom's protocol to upload and store chat messages with certain keywords," he wrote.

TOM Online is a Chinese communications service that partnered with eBay, Skype's owner, to distribute Skype in China.

According to Internet researchers in Canada, the Chinese arm of Skype has been routinely making and storing copies of politically sensitive text messages that users of its software tried to send. Sensitive words include references to the Chinese Communist Party, the Falun Gong, Taiwan independence, Tibet, and the ongoing tainted milk scandal in China.

TOM Online has now fixed the security problem discovered by the researchers. "We are currently addressing the wider issue of the uploading and storage of certain messages with TOM," said Silverman.