Microsoft says Skype users surge 70% amid coronavirus outbreak

It's a good time to call friends who live alone - these lock-downs can be very lonely for them.

Uh ... https://meet.jit.si .... use chrome/chromium browsers. No signup. No tracking. Video, voice, chats, and telephone dialin (not certain about international callers). There are Free apps for iOS and Android.

As for MS-office9.99/month, how about using LibreOffice instead?

For the last 5 yrs, there have been excellent, F/LOSS, alternatives to almost all commercial software. F/LOSS almost always respects your privacy and ALWAYS is $0 and the source code is available for anyone to grab, use, modify and share, just like we were taught in kindergarten. Sharing is good, right?

SkyPe hasn't received good Global Publicity - especially upon BBC interviews where the quality somewhat takes a nose dive into the unintelligible.

From past experience Facetime did well, but Apple changed something, and it too, took a nose dive (especially when Facetiming from the other side of the Great Firewall... (in China).

TOR (https://www.torproject.org) is the best first step, towards resolving your privacy concerns. It may restrict the sites that you can visit/make use of, but then ask yourself why ?

theFu's suggestion seems to work with Tor, and although welcome, I wonder about the old age saying... "there's no such thing as a free lunch".... they must make money somehow... but, just how ? - This is not, entirely clear from their website... they say they have an 8x8 friend...but its not very specific. And who owns 8x8... (following European Privacy regulations we can no longer find out who the f''k a site is registered to, in order to make a somewhat informed decision!!!!)

@theFu... care to comment ?