If both management and employees at Skype (and by implication, eBay) aren't hanging their heads in shame over revelations that they've connived in the secret recording of Skype instant messages in China, then they should.
The company recently apologised following a report which revealed that its Chinese service monitors text chats and stores 'suspicious' ones along with millions of personal user records on computers that can be easily accessed by hackers.
The filtering was undertaken by Skype's Chinese partner, TOM Online, which had produced TOM-Skype, a Chinese edition of the chat and VoIP software client. Chinese users were encouraged to download and use TOM-Skype instead of the usual Skype version.
But TOM-Skype client was apparently programmed to filter for keywords such as 'Communist Party' or 'Taiwan Independence' and then log the offending text along with IP addresses and user names to a server, a fact that became obvious to users as the client would stop or slow down if they typed in banned words - so not exactly sophisticated.
It is thought the activity was undertaken to sweeten the Chinese government to the presence of Skype in the country by feeding the information into the government's considerable online censorship and cyber-surveillance programme.
» This story continues on page 2. Please click here to read
please sign in to rate this article
43938