“Skype is now learning the lesson Yahoo! already learned the hard way: that if you leave your users’ privacy and security to your local partner to sort out without paying too much attention to details or thinking through how things might play out, you could burn your users badly and badly damage the credibility of your global brand.” [Read]
Rebecca MacKinnon looks at how Skype gave up the ghost to China’s spooks:
While Skype claims to have fixed the problem, the fact that TOM-Skype was enabling surveillance and privacy breaches in such a shocking manner for a significant period of time demonstrates that eBay/Skype as a company has not placed enough emphasis on protecting users’ rights and interests. What else is going on - or has gone on - which users don’t know about and which Skype headquarters doesn’t know about either? This incident with TOM raises questions about how trustworthy Skype as a company really is. Even if top management did not intend for such a situation to happen, the fact that it did happen shows that management has not made user rights high enough of a priority company-wide, and have failed to communicate well with their local partners about what practices are acceptable and what practices are not. This situation could have been avoided if they had really been thinking through the potential challenges and pitfalls of working with a local partner in offering a localized internet communications product in the mainland Chinese market. …
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