Letter From Forty-Four Digital Rights Groups Demands Skype Detail Its Surveillance Practices

Skype has long been a stubborn whipping boy for the privacy community–one that not only refuses to make promises about protecting user data from government surveillance, but won’t even reveal basic facts about how and when it hands user conversations over to the government. Now, eight months after the voice-over-IP company was officially integrated into Microsoft, a critical mass of privacy activists are demanding answers.

A group of 44 privacy and free expression groups along with 61 individual academics, activists and entrepreneurs signed their names to an open letter to Microsoft, demanding that its Skype division detail its government surveillance policies and practices. The petition, which includes everyone from Reporters Without Borders and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) to the Tibet Action Network and the hacktivist group Telecomix, calls on Skype to release a “regularly updated Transparency Report” that reveals what data it retains about individuals and for how long, as well as how and when it hands over user data to government agencies.