Recent media reports have accused Skype’s management of changing their privacy policy following their sale to Microsoft, in an effort to help law enforcement agencies keep tabs on video and voice calls. Mark Gillett, Skype’s chief development and operations officer, recently took to the internet to refute those claims, in a statement released through the company’s blog.
Various media reports have surfaced in recent weeks, claiming that Skype has altered their service architecture in such a way that it is easier for law enforcement officers to monitor incoming and outgoing calls. But Gillett declared in his blog post that the privacy policy changes had nothing to do with that, and would be completely contrary to the company philosophy.
Gillett did not mention the specific media outlets questioned, but frankly denied the reports, and also refuted the claim that the changes came down from Microsoft staffers. The referenced changes involved the addition of what Skype calls “supernodes”, a directory distribution that helps Skype users find each other through the service. Gillett also mentioned that these changes went into effect well before Microsoft declared they were buying the VoIP giant in 2011.
VoIP-List.com: extensive catalog of voip providers, available software and hardware resources.
Since Microsoft acquired Skype, they’ve been working to consolidate the supernodes, which had been spread across outsourced cloud servers and dedicated Skype data centers. The goal was to bring them all together with Microsoft, not to work with law enforcement in any structured way.
The issue came to light after an article appeared in The New York Times reporting that law enforcement across the United States submitted more than 1.3 million information requests from the nine major cell phone carriers in United States. The majority of those records were turned over after a subpoena was issued, but some were relinquished due to “emergencies”, without requiring any legal documentation.
Comments