However, WeChat states that it provides various terms and conditions for its non-residents of China, and all data is stored by that account in Hong Kong and Canada, and is subject to European data protection law, although engineers in Singapore and the Netherlands may have access in the instance of a technical problem. A controversial new security law that gives China more power over Hong Kong could make it more difficult for Tencent to block the government from requesting access.
There is also an obvious problem with this: if you send messages to anyone in China, then your messages are stored in Chinese data servers.
“We know that WeChat undertakes censorship for China-registered users, and we know that it also undertakes political oversight from its non-Chinese-registered users to refine its censorship algorithms,” says Deibert.
“We assume that they also supervise registered users of China, but they can not show this empirically.
“There’s a very real risk that China’s security agencies will gain access to customer data, given China’s cyber security laws, but I would not go so far as to say that ‘hoovering’ data from the app.”
Probably people all over the world should be worried about an app that works this way, regardless of whether the surveillance is applied specifically to them. And while the recent Citizen Lab investigation found no evidence that Tencent, the owner of WeChat, shared international information with the Chinese government, it did find that they were subject to content moderation that is essentially overseen, they say.
It was not built as a surveillance app, but as a social media network, but by nature the Chinese government has much more control over it than the governments in the west, despite claims otherwise.
WeChat launched in 2011 as Weixin, Mandarin for “micro message”. It started as a messenger app, not unlike WhatsApp, but turned into an all-in-one, as Chinese people used their smartphones to do daily tasks.
Tencent, now one of the most valuable companies in the world, owns Riot Games, which produces League of Legends, and has a stake in Snapchat and the owner of Fortnite’s Epnies. It was reported that Tencent founder Pony Ma was planning to buy WhatsApp in 2014 before Mark Zuckerberg swept to double its offer to $ 19 billion.
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