While Skype said OK to a partnership that spies on its customers, it was unaware of any security and privacy breaches that have recently been reported. Skype’s Chinese partner, TOM Online, is a communications company abiding the monitoring procedures and regulations set by the Chinese government.

However, while Skype was aware that the Chinese regulators had certain standard procedures to monitor and block instant messages based on keywords that they find to be “offensive,” the company also said that to their understanding, TOM Online’s protocol did not include uploading or storing chat messages with certain keywords, but rather to operate a text filter that stopped “unsuitable” words from being displayed.

Skype President Tom Silverman acknowledged in a blog post that they’ve recently learned about the security issues that allowed public access to anyone to the messages stored on multiple TOM servers. And while the security problem seems to have been solved, Silverman said they are now looking into the issues of uploading and storing chat messages on TOM servers, which was not part of TOM’s protocol.

China in widely known for its extensive use of censorship and surveillance practices, and foreign companies operating in China are forced to comply with these regulations. However Silverman said the situation doesn’t go beyond Chinese borders, and communications outside China are safe and respect privacy rights.

TOM Online is just one of the companies forced to break customer privacy in order to keep its business alive. China is known to be very strict when it comes to sensitive matters that the Chinese people may discuss, including political issues. Furthermore, and curiously enough, China’s extensive censorship did not stop its users from forming the world’s largest Internet population.