Skype China spying on users
A research group in Canada has discovered that Skype and its partner in China TOM Online have been spying on its users, eavesdropping on chat sessions and deploying software that searches for keywords.
The revelations, in a report written by Nart Villeneuve at the Citizen Lab unit of the Munk Centre for International Studies at the University of Toronto, have horrified Skype users and could result in a user backlash against the service.
Reports surfacing from Hong Kong and Beijing say that the more tech literate users have been aware for the past couple of years that the version of Skype offered by TOM Online in China should be avoided because of privacy concerns.
And users elsewhere are now asking whether other Governments have been allowed to snoop, and are questioning the commitment to privacy of Skype and its parent corporation eBay.
The Citizen Lab report found that full text chat messages of TOM-Skype
users, as well as Skype users who have communicated with TOM-Skype users,
are regularly scanned for sensitive keywords, and if present, the resulting
data are uploaded and stored on servers in China.
These text messages, along with millions of records containing personal
information, are stored on insecure publicly-accessible web servers
together with the encryption key required to decrypt the data.
It says the captured messages contain specific keywords relating to
sensitive political topics such as Taiwan independence, the Falun Gong, and
political opposition to the Communist Party of China.
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