WeChat has come under scrutiny over the years. The report goes into detail about how a typical user interacts with a typical Mini Program, saying it uses “extremely verbose logging data which is sent to WeChat servers” and offers this illustration: To make matters worse, the policy is hard to parse and understand. As a result, Citizen Lab found that the owner of WeChat, Chinese conglomerate Tencent Holdings Ltd., collects more usage data than is disclosed in the WeChat privacy policy. There is no reasonable way to opt out of this, and also distressing is that activities in each Mini Program are linked to the WeChat identity. On top of that, all Mini Programs manage their own app permissions.Īpple and Google LLC for years now have made it more obvious how to control app permissions, but that isn’t the case for WeChat. That’s because these lightweight apps automatically enroll a user into the WeAnalyze program for wholesale data collection. But perhaps its most pernicious features can be found in those other downloaded apps, called Mini Programs. WeChat does all those things mentioned at the top of this post. He wrote: “Chinese citizens living abroad can become a covert spy service for Beijing, whether they want to be or not, because the government has access to their location and other personal data.” He calls the app “China’s other Trojan Horse,” referring to TikTok. That advice is only reinforced with the latest research. Earlier this year, Forbes’ Arthur Herman looked critically at WeChat in this review. Just don’t expect anything you do on WeChat to be private.” When the Mozilla Foundation looked at products that had major privacy failings, it said in 2021 that “WeChat is one of the least private messaging apps we’ve come across. This wasn’t the first time WeChat’s features have been examined. They did this deliberately, because they were testing the operation of the app outside China. They reverse-engineered the app and tracked network traffic coming from an Android phone that was registered to a U.S. How serious are the privacy issues with WeChat? Recently, the researchers at The Citizen Lab in Toronto did a deep analysis of WeChat’s privacy ecosystem - or the lack thereof. If you’re banned from WeChat - which can happen, if you post objectionable content for example - you can’t go to the store or the doctor or communicate with your friends and family. By comparison, Meta Platform Inc.’s WhatsApp has at least 2 billion users.īecause of its ubiquity, the app is essential for Chinese people to participate in their society. It’s called WeChat and it has 1.2 billion monthly active users, mostly in China, with about 3 million users in English-speaking countries. What if we had an app on our phones that combined the functions of Facebook Messenger, Venmo payments, MyPatientChart health records and WhatsApp for making voice calls, and also allowed us to download all sorts of mobile apps and games like Apple Inc.’s App Store?įurthermore, what if such an app had absolutely no privacy controls, so the federal government could monitor, censor and track users, conversations and all activities?
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