President Donald Trump sought to ban U.S. In response to a border dispute between India and China, WeChat was banned in India in June 2020 along with several other Chinese apps. Data transmitted by accounts registered outside China is surveilled, analyzed and used to build up censorship algorithms in China. WeChat censors politically sensitive topics in China. User activity on WeChat is analyzed, tracked and shared with Chinese authorities upon request as part of the mass surveillance network in China. WeChat provides text messaging, hold-to-talk voice messaging, broadcast (one-to-many) messaging, video conferencing, video games, sharing of photographs and videos and location sharing. WeChat has been described as China's "app for everything" and a super-app because of its wide range of functions. First released in 2011, it became the world's largest standalone mobile app in 2018, with over 1 billion monthly active users. 'micro-message') is a Chinese instant messaging, social media, and mobile payment app developed by Tencent. WeChat ( Chinese: 微信 pinyin: Wēixìn ( listen) lit. Try NordVPN’s free trial with our 30-day money-back guarantee.Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Japanese, Korean, English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Indonesian, Malay, Thai, Vietnamese, Arabic, Turkish This is probably why the US government is planning to ban WeChat unless an American company buys it. And the active monitoring and real-time censorship is just one more item on the long list of issues this app has. The company can’t prove they never give away their users’ data to the authorities. However, their actions don’t reflect those values. Tencent claims that privacy and security is their top priority. To minimize the risk of a serious data breach, always update your app to get the latest security patches. The more users a service has, the more attractive it is to cybercriminals. If you can, consider having a dedicated smartphone for WeChat communication. Need help coming up with a strong password? Try using a password generator. This way, if WeChat gets compromised, it won’t affect your other accounts. If you reuse passwords often, at least come up with a separate one for WeChat. Try to limit them to only the ones that are necessary for the app to function properly. Try to discuss these things in person or over a secure messaging app. Don’t share sensitive information on the app. If you live in China, it’s almost impossible not to use WeChat. 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. 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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