Skype was unaware of a major privacy problem affecting Skype users in China, the company"s president said Thursday. In a blog posting to the eBay subsidiary"s corporate blog, Skype President Josh Silverman said his company had no idea that the Tom-Skype software, distributed to Skype users in China, was logging chat messages and storing them on a publicly accessible server. "It was our understanding that it was not Tom"s protocol to upload and store chat messages with certain keywords," he wrote.
Tom-Skype is developed by China-based Internet service provider Tom Online. On Wednesday, Canadian researchers published a report (pdf) finding that the Tom-Skype client was storing certain text messages and user information on public servers. The data was encrypted, but the encryption key required to read the data was publicly available.