Skype caught in privacy snafus in China

Skype has admitted that surveillance was carried out on instant messages sent from China, saying that local partner TOM Online was guilty of the eavesdropping. Apparently, a publicly acknowledged text-filter developed to block conversations with sensitive keywords was modified without the eBay subsidiary's knowledge to store and log conversations instead. The issue came to light when the eight insecure and publicly-accessible servers used to archive the millions of censored messages was discovered. Citizen Lab was able to read the messages and expose the eavesdropping (pdf). The revelation cast further doubts on the global firm's commitment to privacy, which had been promoting its Skype platform as a solution offering end-to-end encryption.

To read up more about this story:
- check out this Computerworld article