China listening in on Skype, Microsoft assumes you approve
en.greatfire.org - 
Skype is one of the most popular services for making phone calls and chatting over the Internet, but users are probably not aware that phone calls and text chats can be monitored by the censorship authorities in China. As stated in Skype's Privacy Policy, this is due to its partnership with Tom Online in China.
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I wonder if this makes a difference if you use the local build from Tom.com or the international version.
I noticed years ago when going to skype.com, you get re-directed to the tom.com site and the download is a different size than the non-tom.com version.
Also, for android, Skype can not be installed from the Android market when logging in with my account on my computer to my different devices. I get the "This not available in your region" or some such message.
I wonder if Ryan would have any insight.
This is very much the point. TOM Skype is not Skype - that's why you get redirected when you try to access it in China.
If you have TOM Skype you're practically asking for the Chinese government agencies to 'monitor' your call - it's a domestic product as much as QQ is, and subject to the same rules. It also has pop-up ads, which means commercial tracking.
skype has had backdoors for sniffing your activities from the very beginning. and the same goes for microsoft's windows afair.
I've always downloaded Skype from the International link, and never used the TOM version for this very reason. I've no idea if Microsoft has opened security holes in the regular Skype version (non-TOM), but I know as of a couple years ago Skype was touting that it was tight as a drum. No black helicopters here yet.
Were you here the year that Skype -- if it had been downloaded outside of China -- suddenly stopped working, and everyone (without a VPN) was basically forced to download the tom version? It was 2007-2009, sometime in there. I remember because it happened at our apartment and at our NGO's office in Tianjin. It prompted some colleagues to dig around and find out what tom skype was. We switched back the next time we were in North America.
I thought (That's what I get for thinking again.) that Skype Before Microsoft was a distributed network (no servers--no central data hub) which made monitoring rather un-easy. Perhaps that's been improved since MSFT took over. Yippee. PGP still around?