However, dropping WeChat entirely might be difficult for many people. If you still need a way to communicate with contacts in China, we suggest using another app and a reliable VPN provider that works in China. The best and only way to be absolutely sure you’re safe from WeChat’s surveillance is to never register for it in the first place. If this is true, using WeChat would be extremely unsafe.
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It can collect data about you, change your security settings, and download other apps without your permission. This is a kind of malware that hides in the background and monitors your activity. Some researchers have also suggested that WeChat might include spyware. Their requests probably most often won’t have anything to do with legal processes – just general surveillance and data collection for intelligence. That means that if authorities request certain data, they will get it. On the other hand, Tencent is bound to obey the Chinese government’s orders. On the one hand, hackers might be tempted to find and steal that information - a billion people’s data could bring them quite a lot of money on the dark web. The information the app collects must be stored somewhere, and users don’t know what security measures are set in place to protect it. The app has backdoors that allow third parties to read the messages you send and receive. WeChat does not offer end-to-end encryption, a privacy feature that users expect from most messaging apps. While WeChat only censors users with phone numbers from mainland China, its surveillance is far-reaching. Pictures, comments, and blog posts are subject to heavy censorship, with undesirable opinions disappearing quickly from the platform. Like all services in China, it is under constant government surveillance.
In 2016, WeChat was ranked dead last in Amnesty International’s “Security rankings of instant messaging services,” receiving zero points out of 100.Ĭensorship is one of the main problems with WeChat. To foreigners, it’s just another messaging app, but it’s one of the few that work both in and out of China. It allows users to book doctor’s appointments, share their vacation pics, and send money to their friends, among many other things. It’s incredibly popular in China where it’s a mega-app. WeChat is a social network/messaging app with over a billion users worldwide.
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