Report Claims TOM-Skype Stores User Data on Unsecure Servers

A report released this week by Canadian researchers alleges TOM-Skype, the Chinese version of Ebay’s Skype, run in cooperation with TOM Online, monitors users Skype chats, scanning for certain words.

The report, Breaching Trust : An analysis of surveillance and security practices on China’s TOM-Skype platform, claims that the chats of TOM-Skype users, along with 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. Such keywords relate to Taiwanese independence, the Falun Gong and political opposition to the Communist Party of China.

According to The Wall Street Journal, a Skype spokesperson, Jennifer Caukin, said that the idea that the Chinese government “might be monitoring communications in and out of the country shouldn’t surprise anyone,” however other findings of the report were also worrying. The report says that the conversations stored are easily accessible by the general public.

“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.”

While Caukin said people shouldn’t be surprised to hear about the monitoring of communications, she did say the company was concerned to hear about the “apparent security issue.” Caukin said that once they informed TOM about it, they fixed the flaw.

The news comes after a long summer of controversy over censored content during the Olympic Games in Beijing.