Skype has apologized after a report revealed that TOM Online, majority owners of Skype’s Chinese venture firm TOM-Skype, has been monitoring and storing text chats without Skype’s knowledge, Reuters reports. The eBay-owned chat service explained messages with politically sensitive keywords and ones opposing the Communist Party of China have been stored with personal user records on computers easily accessible to other parties, including the Chinese government. It also said that TOM had changed the privacy policies without Skype’s consent or knowledge and the privacy breach has since been fixed. While a Skype spokeswoman said the company acknowledged in 2006 that TOM was operating a text filter that blocked certain messages without compromising users’ privacy, the policy has changed.

The news comes as a result of a University of Toronto Citizen lab report saying that messages sent by and to TOM-Skype users were being scanned for phrases such as “Taiwan independence” or “Falun Gong.” When these keywords were found, they were stored with the according usernames of subscribers on publicly accessible serves, locked with an encryption key.