Hacker News Reader

Comment by walrus01 | Hacker News Reader

I'm honestly astonished when I see people in North America with tencent, wechat/wepay or alipay apps installed on their phones. Why would you voluntarily subject yourself to Beijing's censorship, have all of your chat contents run through a centralized server in the mainland, and have every one of your payment transactions easily tracked/monitored by Beijing...

View on HN

Some people have Chinese friends and don't realize what the app is doing in the background. I didn't when I installed it, just assumed it was Chinese LINE.

I had it on my phone for a while for a couple friends that were new to the country. They eventually switched over to other things and I forgot about the app. I hadn't opened it in a couple months but noticed I had been going through data quickly. WeChat, an app that once again hadn't been opened in two months and I talked to less than five people on a handful of times, had uploaded two gigs of data in that time frame. I immediately uninstalled and explain the reasoning every time I'm asked to reinstall. Most people have no clue how egregious it is.

> WeChat, an app that once again hadn't been opened in two months and I talked to less than five people on a handful of times, had uploaded two gigs of data in that time frame.

Was that just upload or all data usage? If your contacts posted to their "moments" during that time frame, I'd expect WeChat to download the content in case you want to look at it.

I don't remember, it may have been a combination or just upload. I just uninstalled it after seeing it had such massive data usage in comparison to everything else on my phone and I hadn't even opened it in 2 months.

Is that on iOS or Android? If it's Android I'm not surprised, the permissions system was a disaster last time I used it (admittedly a while ago), but I would hope that iOS doesn't allow WeChat to run in the background.

Any studies on the type of data that WeChat is uploading in the background?

as I recall, it hashes all of your photos and videos in preparation for comparison against a list of known-banned things, because one of its centralized one-to-one chat and group-chat features is implementing CCP government policy censorship. Try sharing to a group chat an image of something going viral that the CCP doesn't want mainlanders to see. You might see it as posted to the chat, but nobody else receives it.

That happens when you share that specific file, I don't think they preemptively scan the filesystem in the background.

It’s probsbly not too different from why people have Facebook even if they don’t like the platform. It’s a convenient gateway to communicate with parents or friends who are otherwise hard to communicate with (asynchronously or what have you).

I do business with Chinese contract manufacturers and have WeChat installed to communicate with them. Can you tell me what the app is doing on an iPhone when it's either in the background or not running at all? My assumption has always been that communications over WeChat are accessible by the Chinese government, but is there more to it than just that?

I don't see it too different from the big players in North America that don't guarantee end-to-end encryption (and for those apps there's also an assumption of honesty when it comes to that guarantee). Just because Facebook isn't directly owned by the US government doesn't mean it can't be creepy as all get-out.

> Just because Facebook isn't directly owned by the US government doesn't mean it can't be creepy as all get-out.

Sure, but being "creepy" is hardly the issue here.

I had an app "camscanner pro" that I believe was purchased by tencent along the way and then they tried to put everything "in the cloud".

Also TikTok.

Check out the manifest of their Android app and trace the traffic - they are definitely uploading more than they should.

That's largely the belief system that is behind Google, Facebook, YouTube, etc being banned in China.

Eh better be spied by the goverment in the other side of the world than in yours.

So you end up being spied by both.

They can certainly try, but they usually cant, and you see China banning american services, US against Huawei,etc

i guess you probably already forgot all the information leaked by Snowden and the PRISM project.

Might be ignorance of that fact. A chinese national posted a tour guide on reddit for an esports tournament in Shanghai, and this was their description of WeChat.

>Wechat: Chinese Whatsapp and Facebook rolled into one, you should set it up beforehand. This is THE most used app in China, just about everyone uses it and it is an essential means of communication. If you meet anyone you want to stay in touch with, add them through Wechat and you’re good to go. Perhaps someday you might even discover the fabled meme trove of China that is Wechat Stickers…

If you don't do your own research and just listen to mainland Chinese opinions, it could seem like an innocuous app like anything else.

At the same time, wechat IS the most used app in China. So if you do want to keep up with Chinese mainlanders you're somewhat stuck (and I realize all the shit that comes with the app)...

this is partly why I have reservations about installing TikTok

Reply on news.ycombinator.com