For several days now, the security issues sparked by Skype’s activities in China have been highly debated everywhere. The US-owned Web communications firm has been put against the wall for conducting a monitoring process of its users’ conversations, recording them and storing them on its servers.

The matter involves the people that used the service provided by TOM-Skype, Skype’s partener in China, who had their discussions monitored and and any message that was tagged as offensive by the Chinese government, was stored for further investigations.

Josh Silverman, Skype's president, explained in a blog post a few days ago that the company knew about the government’s monitoring process and presented the situation to its users back in 2006, stating that they should be aware that certain words used in chat messages will be blocked by a text filter. "It was our understanding that it was not TOM's protocol to upload and store chat messages with certain keywords," he added in the blog post. "And we are now inquiring with TOM to find out why the protocol changed."

Considering the fact that censorship is extremely common in China and that its government monitors all communications, the news should not come as a surprise to anyone. Still, Mr. Silverman assured the company’s clients that Skype’s computer-to-computer voice calls are and have always been completely secure and private.

Without a doubt, the company lost a lot of its appeal as a result of this incident, and it’s hard to predict its next move, which should attempt to boost back its decreasing popularity.