Skype, Censorship and China – A shameful nexus

ICTs in general 1 Minute

In what is a shameful and outrageous admission, noted VoIP provider Skype recently admitted that a joint venture in China Monitors users communications. Global Insight breaks it down thus,

Significance

Skype has admitted breaching customer privacy with its Chinese joint-venture.

Implications

Several internet companies, including Google and Yahoo, have been criticised in the past for being too helpful in enabling censorship in China.

Outlook

A group of international internet service companies, including Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, are drawing up a voluntary code of conduct in negotiations with human-rights groups, academics and investors.

First revelations that Skype wasn’t as secure as it made itself out to be came from Austria. These reports from China don’t help in restoring public confidence in the company, even though in many cases, it is still by far the most secure communications platform available for the likes of human rights and media freedom defenders. As reported by Reuters,

“We may never know whether some of those people whose conversations were logged have gone to jail or have had their lives ruined in various ways as a result of this,” said Rebecca MacKinnon, an Internet expert at Hong Kong University. “This is a big blow to Skype’s credibility, despite the fact that Skype executives are downplaying it as not such a big deal.”

Published by Sanjana

An Ashoka, Rotary World Peace and TED Fellow, I have since 2002 used, studied and advocated Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) to strengthen peace, human rights & democratic governance. I founded in 2006 and till June 2020 edited the award-winning Groundviews, Sri Lanka's first civic media website. From 2002-2020 I was a Senior Researcher at the Centre for Policy Alternatives. I pioneered both the use of social media for activism and online citizen journalism/civic media in Sri Lanka, including setting up South Asia's first Twitter and Facebook accounts for civic media, in 2007. Having started digital security training for human rights activists in 2010, I continue to advise civil society on digital hygiene, mass and personal surveillance, privacy and secure communications to date. I also curate a comprehensive digital archive of material linked to peace and conflict in Sri Lanka, since 2002. I specialise in, advise and train on social media communications strategy, countering-violence extremism online, web-based activism, online advocacy and grounded, context-based, platform-specific social media research. My work experience over two-decades spans five continents. Through the ICT4Peace Foundation and since 2006, I help strengthen information management during crises and work on countering violent extremism online. For over a decade, this included leading the Foundation's work on these lines with the United Nations and other multi-lateral organisations involved in peacebuilding, peacekeeping, and humanitarian affairs. Since 2008, I have worked in South Asia, South East Asia, North Africa, Europe and the Balkans to capture, disseminate and archive inconvenient truths in austere, violent contexts. I completed doctoral studies at the University of Otago, New Zealand, looking at the symbiotic relationship between offline unrest and online instigation of hate and harm in Sri Lanka and, in the aftermath of the Christchurch massacre in 2019, facilitated by leading research based on New Zealand's first ever Data for Good grant by Twitter.

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