Skype is free, but in China, a hidden cost

After Google and Yahoo! and Microsoft, there was Skype — the latest U.S. company to buckle to China’s draconian Internet laws. But this most recent scandal might be the most alarming of all. Citizen Lab, a research group at the University of Toronto, reports that China tracked and recorded Skype instant messaging (IM) conversations, storing massive amounts of private data. 

How did it work? 

The tracking system was based on keywords — red flags such as “Communist,” “Falun” (of the banned Falun Gong religious movement) and “Taiwan independence.” Users couldn’t send these words over IM, but the contents of the message were nonetheless recorded and stored on a publicly accessible database.

This chart, from researchers’ report, charts the frequency of “trigger words” in surveyed IM discussions:

Says the report,

Villeneuve [one of the researchers] was able to view, download, and archive millions of private communications, ranging from business transactions to political correspondence, along with their identifying personal information…  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.

The outcry has already begun. Activists worry that dissidents could be jailed on Skype-compiled evidence. Google in particular, did great harm to its “Do no evil” image by helping Chinese authorities before.

Skype is in for a barrage of criticism too, I suspect. And thanks to its own software, Chinese users can place those complaint calls for free. Kind of.