WeChat is Watching: Living in China with the app that knows everything about me

http://nautil.us/issue/73/play/wechat-is-watching

by ForHackernews • 7 years ago

402 283 7 years ago

_sveq• 7 years ago

I go to China often but it's been two years now. I don't look forward to the next visit for this very reason—I'll need this to pay for any and everything. I'm not going back.

catherd• 7 years ago

Cash still works exactly the way it always has, (almost) nobody is going to turn down your business because you don't pay by an app.

spectramax• 7 years ago

Besides payments, WeChat is inextricably tied to everything you do in China from chatting with your friends to buying a movie ticket to visa renewals. I've spent over 400 nights in Chinese cities and I depend on WeChat like I depend on water.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WeChat#Features

loyukfai• 7 years ago

Naturally, going onwards, places and things that one cannot buy and/or go without an e-wallet will gradually increase, right?

teknologist2• 7 years ago

There are shops in the big cities that are starting to refuse cash now (apparently, this is not illegal in China) and only accept the two big payment apps.

yesforwhat3• 7 years ago

i've lost count of the amount of times i've been refused a coffee or beer because they don't except cash or visa card.

It's only going to get worse.

markplindsay3• 7 years ago

I was in China (Beijing and Wenzhou) in April. I had NO success finding a taxi in Beijing—the only way to get a ride was to use an app like Didi Chuxing.

I was able to install and use it just fine. The problem was that it is impossible to link a non-PRC payment method to it. The same is true for WeChat Pay or Alipay—you've got to use a Chinese bank account or card as a source. I was not able to find a way around this despite over an hour of experimenting with the apps.

In contrast, it was easy to get taxis in Wenzhou. The drivers all initially asked for electronic payment, though, so it's probably only a matter of regulation that is preventing them from going cashless.

dewey4• 7 years ago

I was there last month and it was almost impossible to get money on your WeChat account without a Chinese bank account. It was easy to fund my Malaysian WeChat account but the balance isn't transferable or usable in China.

There's currently one remaining loop hole I know about which is to pay someone to send money via a red envelope / hóngbāo but it's getting increasingly harder. It's already asking you for a passport and right now it still works even if you cancel that but probably not for much longer. You can do that either if you know someone, ask someone in a store if they do it from their personal account or through some websites that take PayPal but with a hefty commission usually.

usaar3333• 7 years ago

Is this a loop hole or intentional? I'm guessing wechat doesn't care to optimize the visitor experience.

Has it ever been different? Afaik, it's as limited as it always was; they just added identity verification.

amaccuish• 7 years ago

What's the point of this though? Surely it hurts tourism to China? Wouldn't it be better if foreigners could easily use wechat pay?

ghaff3• 7 years ago

At least last time I was there, you needed a Chinese bank account to link. A quick search suggests there are a few workarounds but you probably still can't just add a foreign credit card.

qrbLPHiKpiux• 7 years ago

What an unintended consequence. Was there any way to have seen it?

ajxs• 7 years ago

Is this comment a joke?

292355744930110• 7 years ago

They are more like intended consequences.

floor_• 7 years ago

Not to be confused with WeeChat. The curses terminal irc client.

dewey4• 7 years ago

Would anyone really be confused by that?

hn23• 7 years ago

So compared to this Google looks like a mom and pop shop when it comes to data collection..but now think about the frame here. It is done in China not in the /free/ world..

ggg23• 7 years ago

yes.

nobody complained when US (and everyone else later on) required online forms for visa requests. full of google Analytics tags and all.

afjl• 7 years ago

This is not true at all. There was an incredible amount of dissatisfaction and anger about this decision. In my own household, we discussed the implications of that decision. Please read through the comments on these 2 posts:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20065142

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20075608

adinobro15• 7 years ago

A few things worth being aware of Alibaba does not own WeChat but rather's it's competition Alipay. It does not have any access to WeChat data.

So far the "social credit" on seems to be mostly based on how much you buy and it only seems to give you discounts to massively overpriced products (similar to a credit card reward system).

You don't really download apps in Wechat but rather add a link more like a Facebook App (JavaScript & HTML).

Chinese people tend to like one app that does everything. Most of the services talked about in the article as separate services that you can open in WeChat but you can also open most of them in AliPay or Taobao or access them directly on their own websites. This is what Facebook tried to do but failed...

What I find fascinating is that a lot of older people that use WeChat in China are illiterate apart from numbers. They do everything by remembering the pictures and other people help them to set up their account. That is part of the reason why they want a single app that does everything. You don't need to read since you can just send messages, look at pictures and iconography.

Also, everyone in China still accepts cash but you generally need correct change.

If you have any questions feel free to ask. I just found out my sesame-credit score is 622 (not that it does anything...)

jstanley• 7 years ago

You don't need to read since you can just send messages

How can illiterate people send messages?

robjan• 7 years ago

In countries and regions where Chinese is spoken, people heavily use the voice message functionality.

adinobro15• 7 years ago

There is a button that you hold down and it sends a voice message (up to 60 seconds). They generally just send voice messages back and forth.

There is also a + for extra features like: * Sending a photo * Sending a short video * Calling * Money * Location

You don't need to be able to read to use any of them.

ggg23• 7 years ago

same way toddlers install apps: voice and voice to text input.

also in china older generations migth be literate but not capable of typing in a phone/computer.

powerapple7• 7 years ago

Sesame credit score is used when you use to book a hotel online, if you score is higher you don't need a deposit. It linked to how much money you can borrow from some services. It is basically a credit score similar to what you get from credit agency.

adinobro15• 7 years ago

I don't stay in hotels that expensive (I generally have to pay up front) very often and since I'm not Chinese I don't have access to most loans here either.

JumpCrisscross• 7 years ago

It is basically a credit score similar to what you get from credit agency

With the salient difference of judging one’s political views and affiliations. Like if FICO took into account the number of times you praised or criticised the President.

michaelsattler• 7 years ago

With MiniApps you do download apps. When I was at Nike last year we rolled out into that ecosphere.

rconti2• 7 years ago

It's crazy to me that they decided to ALSO use a 950 max score. Like, you couldn't have been SLIGHTLY creative and made it out of 1000, or 100?

zachguo3• 7 years ago

I can imagine it would be easier to be compatible with existing systems that businesses are using.

envolt4• 7 years ago

Also, everyone in China still accepts cash but you generally need correct change.

They do. But fake currency is very common in China. I was advised not to use cash. But since I'm not from China, I wasn't able to setup wechat pay account which is very common .

Most of the restaurants I had been to had currency checker machines.

kwizzt3• 7 years ago

Of all the time I've lived in China, I probably have only seen counterfeit money once in my life. Do you have any evidence to back up your claim?

chenster• 7 years ago

I stopped reading after "Alibaba does not own WeChat but rather's it's competition Alipay"...

What are you talking about??

Alipay and Alibaba are under the same AliGroup umbrella, not its competitor. 30% of Alibaba stake is actually owned by Japanese conglomerate holding company SoftBank

kwizzt3• 7 years ago

I think he meant Alibaba owns Alipay, which is a competitor to WeChat's payment system.

skinnymuch3• 7 years ago

What AliGroup umbrella? You mean an unofficial one since Alipay is owned by Ant Financial which is independent.

The post says Alibaba owns Alipay. Not WeChat.

iliketosleep• 7 years ago

Also, everyone in China still accepts cash but you generally need correct change.

There's a growing minority of vendors that no longer accept cash (they have signs up saying so), but from what I've seen it's only in areas with youthful populations.

skinnymuch3• 7 years ago

Alibaba doesn’t own Alipay. Alipay’s parent company is the independent Ant Financial. Considered a startup by some still.

jcbrand2• 7 years ago

At 9:27, once I’ve brushed my teeth, answered a few messages, and wiped the sleep from my eyes, I order a coffee through WeChat. There’s a payments window on the app, and when you click on it you see various options, some proprietary to WeChat and some which are independent apps that run on WeChat’s platform. I open the Meituan delivery app and scroll through all the coffee options around me. I order an Americano. I have my WeChat linked with the facial recognition scanner on my iPhone; when I pay, I just hold my phone up to my face and a green tick flicks across the screen. Seven minutes later, I get a message telling me the coffee is on the way, with the name and number of the delivery driver. It arrives at 9:53.

Is it too much effort to just make your own coffee in your own apartment? Does that now also have to be delivered to you? The amount of waste involved in this just boggles my mind.

sergiomattei• 7 years ago

Uh... What?

It's the reason Starbucks exists. People are on the go, and they don't want to make their own coffee.

This is literally the same as going to the corner coffee shop to buy a Frappuccino.

jcbrand2• 7 years ago

Going to Starbucks is not the same as having coffee delivered to your home, especially not if you walk there.

yborg• 7 years ago

If the corner coffee shops took 26 minutes to get me a cup of coffee I'd probably have to give it up entirely if I was really too lazy to spend the 90 seconds of effort in my kitchen that gives me a cup of coffee in about 5 minutes.

th3iedkid• 7 years ago

Is it too much effort to just make your own coffee in your own apartment? Does that now also have to be delivered to you? The amount of waste involved in this just boggles my mind.

Not from China but have been different phases of life where have either preferred to have early morning coffe delivered/fetched/made myself in my apartment. Different priorities would drove the choices for me. Pricing differences between walking-fetching and having it delivered it on a schedule to my place were not much. Making it often required me to maintain a lot of things , which i preferred depending on place, nature of work besides other priorities.

bamboozled• 7 years ago

I’m curious, do people even enjoying drinking nice / real coffee anymore when drinking from Starbucks or have it delivered and sipping it at your desk or in the elevator, or is this just some kind of habit like smoking?

Why not just wash down a caffeine pill with warm glass of water for the kick and move when time pressed?

powerapple7• 7 years ago

WeChat basically created a platform, allows third party apps to have their html5 version of app in WeChat platform. Basically the same as Google Login. You can choose to use their independent version of app directly to do the same thing. WeChat is very successful on this platform, I can imagine future phones just need WeChat to work properly and all the apps in it will function. Those apps are not WeChat or Tencent apps though, just web apps work inside WeChat.

drubbo3• 7 years ago

The author also waited 25 minutes for a coffe; it takes 2 with a moka, half with a coffee machine.

ohnope2• 7 years ago

2 minutes with a moka? I seriously need to step up my game.

1 minute: hang grind fresh beans

1 minute: take out moka pot, fill with water, put coffee in, put on stove

3-6 minutes depending on ambient temp: moka boils

1 minute: pour cup, wash out moka pot

Moka is such a pain. I drip now for time efficiency.

nerd74732• 7 years ago

Absolutely right, people need to get up off their asses (sorry) if they want coffee.

kingkawn• 7 years ago

Cmon cmon, in nyc people have been calling the bodega to order anything and everything for decades, including single cups of tea.

panglott• 7 years ago

Yep, Chengdu is a huge, dense city, with about 10 million people.

Now I'm feeling nostalgic, I was only there for a few weeks, but with the parks, teahouses, and food, it was my favorite city in China.

La-ang2• 7 years ago

Lol.Those poor people tracking him on behalf of the CPC on Wechat must be also making the same assumption, but they have bills to pay :D

jshowa3• 7 years ago

Even worse, could you maybe leave your room and go get a coffee? It literally would've taken you the same amount of time if you did just that depending on how close the coffee place is, and I would guess it isn't far.

mixmastamyk• 7 years ago

Is it too much effort to just make your own coffee in your own apartment?

Don't even need extra equipment. Trader Joe's has a nice cold-brew. Pour a finger width into a cup, add some almond/coconut milk, then put in the microwave for ~60 seconds. Hot vitamin-c in under two minutes. No way I could wait almost thirty.

darkpuma• 7 years ago

Yeah, 26 minute turnaround for coffee is pretty damn shit, even by starbucks standards, but I expect the novelty of getting coffee delivered is sufficient to keep something this ridiculous on the market.

kylegordon• 7 years ago

'It knows my biometric information; it knows the very contours of my face.'

The iPhone does, WeChat doesn't.

mstaoru5• 7 years ago

Nope, in this case the camera is run by Wechat and they have their own biometric database.

Tepix2• 7 years ago

Can you use a password instead?

m2zyi• 7 years ago

FaceID or TouchID 's information is truely own by IPhone,Wechat use camera can only take photo or video,but when u login, speak six number to wechat,this is own by Wechat.

test1235• 7 years ago

How is the Chinese government with regards to IT quality?

I've come to believe that most governments are inept when it comes to the management, security and general quality of their software.

With the government holding so much critical information, it seems a very obvious and valuable target for hackers.

helloindia• 7 years ago

China Facial Recognition Database Leak Sparks Fears Over Mass Data Collection

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kateoflahertyuk/2019/02/18/chin...

adinobro15• 7 years ago

WeChat is a private company owned by Tencent.

rtpg2• 7 years ago

I mean.... the govt can check whatever they want on the WeChat logs. And the populace is pretty accepting of this for security reasons (if you aren’t going off the “government can be corrupt and abuse it’s powers” principle its actually kinda hard to make the privacy argument!)

wener• 7 years ago

Tencent is gov friendly company. Basically, data owned by gov.

pwinnski• 7 years ago

This is a distinction without a difference in China.

avcdsuia• 7 years ago

I've come to believe that most governments are inept when it comes to the management, security and general quality of their software.

They are very well aware of it, so they do outsourcing to pro-CCP companies, e.g. Hikvision, Face++.

n10002• 7 years ago

Going to China soon and everybody tells me WeChat will help me a lot over there. However, I cannot create my account without a "voiceprint". It wants me to read some numbers to fingerprint my voice. Apparently I cannot skip this step and I am not very comfortable with that.

adinobro15• 7 years ago

I actually find Alipay easier to use for payments and it is easier to set up. If you don't want to chat I would use it instead.

yoz-y2• 7 years ago

I have created a WeChat account years ago and I can not actually use it for payments. I don't know why it is but the wallet option never appears.

markplindsay3• 7 years ago

Can you set up Alipay with a non-Chinese bank account or card?

It works great for Chinese people and foreign residents of the PRC who have a bank account. However, my experience as a tourist was that it was impossible to link my US credit card using the PRC version of the app downloaded while in China.

phito• 7 years ago

What if you slightly change your voice everytime you're using it?

yread• 7 years ago

try some text2speech programs?

bigzyg33k• 7 years ago

Probably not a good idea for his purposes, as the app with use that to authenticate you in the future, and you may not have the same text2speech program readily available when it does.

driverdan• 7 years ago

How does it handle people who are unable to speak?

novok• 7 years ago

probably as well as china deals with people in wheelchairs

envolt4• 7 years ago

Ask someone from China for an Invitation to WeChat, it shouldn't be the case (Not sure if they have made it mandatory in last few months)

n10002• 7 years ago

It’s weird. Nobody else in my company seems to have this issue. For me it is a mandatory step in the registration process.

foozed2• 7 years ago

It knows my biometric information; it knows the very contours of my face.

I was under the impression that Face ID does not leak such information to whatever app is using it?

_ropu• 7 years ago

No, FaceID doesn't leak informations about your face. Just like TouchID doesn't leak your fingerprint.

NotPaidToPost2• 7 years ago

This has nothing to do with FaceID, which isn't mentioned in the article.

WeChat has its own face recognition system.

foozed2• 7 years ago

Ah ok, i thought the author meant FaceID in the passage:

I have my WeChat linked with the facial recognition scanner on my iPhone

was not aware that WeChat has its own system. They don't get to use the "special" FaceID sensors/scanners though right? Just the camera?

rcao• 7 years ago

No, WeChat and Alipay do use FaceID to do payment verification on iPhone.

ConfusedDog2• 7 years ago

If it wasn’t for the fact that I grew up in London and use a VPN to jump the great firewall to keep in touch with my friends at home and use Google, I could go entire days without leaving WeChat.

I wonder what VPN people use in China to access Google. When I was there last month, I couldn't find a single one that worked for more than a few days.

parhaml• 7 years ago

Last month would have been close to impossible. The leadup to the Tiananmen anniversary would see stronger crackdowns on VPN use.

arnvald• 7 years ago

I've been to China a couple of times and ExpressVPN works most of the time for me. However the most reliable way to have a decent connection was Algo VPN deployed to AWS. It was far superior both in terms of reliability and in terms of speed.

ConfusedDog2• 7 years ago

Thanks! I will try out Algo VPN. I had no idea AWS works in China.

ubercow137• 7 years ago

I tried this recently (Algo with wireguard) and it was probably the most reliable way, but still blocked very quickly on some ISPs, for example it never worked through my China Telecom phone.

sreekanthr3• 7 years ago

Express VPN work.

Most of Tech Organizations have deal with Govt to allow them to access google & gmail.

Best bet is to get International data roaming then use your phone to check email etc. If you are transiting via Singapore would recommend you to get a Singapore sim which supports international data roaming and using it in China.

the_resistence• 7 years ago

A bunch work, you have to rotate thru them and have some self-hosted too I hear from friends. DWeb can't come quickly enough.

La-ang2• 7 years ago

what about Wechat tracking you even though when not using its features? I don't think CPC would patiently wait until you launch the app to start logging your behavior.

jw14• 7 years ago

I've been wondering for a long time about this.

My thinking has been that while apps should be sandboxed given China, its (apparent) goals and (apparent from media) past behavior I'm thinking they would invest as much manpower as it takes to figure out how to break iOS/Android sandboxes and turn the phone into a full time listening/tracking device.

I'd love to hear from someone who knows more about mobile OS security regarding this. Is the above a likely or possible scenario or am I being too paranoid?

adinobro15• 7 years ago

Why bother? They already have access to cell phone location data and meta information. I'm sure in China it is direct access. In the US it is a two-step process. Not that it would make much difference in practice.

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130901/23253224379/att-h...

There was a great article in Australia about this a few years back: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-08-16/metadata-retention-pr...

netsharc• 7 years ago

A while ago I ran a thought experiment, Facebook could also track things like this. If my phone spent the night not at home, it can probably surmise that my relationship with (person who I've been exchanging FB/WhatsApp messages with increasing frequency the last few weeks) has progressed to the next level. Especially if it can see the phone spent the night connected to their SSID, but with both of us having zero interactions with FB apps.

Is there FB analytics built into Netflix? Then they could even say what we watched on Netflix that night.

A machine learning bot that can write just the right thing to a potential date is probably doable, albeit creepy. It's even easier if the bot can see their entire social media and IM history...

mtrovo• 7 years ago

Where there's a way there's a will.

So say US has interest on country X, can you 100% guarantee that none of the following data could be used to target some individuals of said country: - Facebook social graph - WhatsApp conversations - Skype voice and video chats - Google location history - visa credit card transactions

IMHO it's just a matter of how big is the interest. Maybe it wouldn't happen to use this data for personal reasons but it would be very strange to imagine an army leader citing foreigners personal data protection when the country is at war.

canada_dry• 7 years ago

What's better... being in China knowing that everything you do is being watched, or living elsewhere and just suspecting that everything you do is being watched by some three letter agency?

(Tencent declined to comment for this article)

More likely: (I didn't dare to request comment from Tencent or my social credit score would have plummeted).

dawhizkid2• 7 years ago

Why isn't anyone worried about TikTok?

Yes, WeChat is largely contained to China, but TikTok/ByteDance is global and a top 10 app in the U.S. It would be naive to think that there isn't a backdoor to that app. And it's video.

There's also precedence for this e.g. the U.S. forcing Grindr's Chinese owner to sell.

majia• 7 years ago

It seems you don’t have a good idea about what a backdoor is. A tiktok app can’t spy on your email or Facebook message.

It’s reasonable to worry about whatever data you give tiktok, but you should probably worry a lot more about Facebook or google which collects far more private data.

dawhizkid2• 7 years ago

You can DM people on TikTok just like most other social networking apps.

rchaud• 7 years ago

We're in the phase now where we celebrate TikTok for being a launchpad for 15-minute celebrities who inspire us to buy more crap.

Once it becomes passe, or once the app has a major security breach, that's when the Chinese origins of the app will be front and center in every news pub.

m-p-32• 7 years ago

I dunno, it feels like TikTok came in to swoop the void left by Vine I guess.

scilro3• 7 years ago

I find WeChat and its aggressively centralized model fascinating, and something to keep eyes on, but this article falls into the familiar trap of playing a bit loose with the facts when it comes to how the Chinese government surveils its citizens.

For example, this is from article:

People are regularly arrested for messages they send in supposedly “private” group chats. In 2017, two people were arrested in Nanjing for separate instances of making satirical comments referring the massacre in the city by the Japanese in 1937.5

But if you read the original source: http://www.sixthtone.com/news/1001901/more-nanjing-massacre-...

“Nanjing is a pit,” Wang wrote. “We should let the Japanese come slaughter again.” Local police were alerted to the incident after screenshots of Wang’s messages were circulated on social media, and they arrested him two days later.

Clearly, a bit of a different story than what's implied in this article. I can easily see someone being questioned by police in almost any country if screenshots leaked where they joked about repeating a violent historical atrocity, like 9/11 for example.

It's not clear to me why folks tend to advance the notion that Chinese citizens are under constant 1984-style 24/7 surveillance by their government. That's not quite how it works over there, at least, if people who live and work there are to be trusted.

noja• 7 years ago

It depends who distributed the screenshots.

deathhand• 7 years ago

In case anyone doesn't know about Parallel construction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction

yorwba5• 7 years ago

Probably one of the 314 other people in the group felt offended.

gbrown• 7 years ago

Not everyone has to actually be constantly surveiled for the effects to be the same, a-la panopticon.

scilro3• 7 years ago

Absolutely, and to me this is a more reasonable framework to understand how technology-enabled surveillance works in China and elsewhere.

ssnistfajen5• 7 years ago

It's not clear to me why folks tend to advance the notion that Chinese citizens are under constant 1984-style 24/7 surveillance by their government.

Because that gets readers to click the article. They don't care how anything actually works.

Complex and nuanced analysis of sociopolitical issues does not make for sensational copy. When the boogeyman is the right one, people will believe anything said about it and swallow the story whole without question.

beenBoutIT2• 7 years ago

The Japan that raped Nanjing hasn't existed for decades, the comment is extremely offensive but can't be taken literally. This is the Chinese equivalent of an Israeli telling a Hitler joke, insensitive and offensive but not taken literally because the bad guy is long dead.

crimsonalucard• 7 years ago

Japan has repeatedly refused to apologize or even admit such atrocities occurred. It further fuels the fire. They've even edited their textbooks to gloss over the fact.

artificial• 7 years ago

It's not clear to me why folks tend to advance the notion that Chinese citizens are under constant 1984-style 24/7 surveillance by their government. That's not quite how it works over there, at least, if people who live and work there are to be trusted.

There are a number of stories about surveillance over the years. [0] Here's one about a BBC reporter who was found in 7 minutes using their CC system. The situation with the [1] Ugyhurs and crack down on Muslims. Also the [2] Social Credit system which is tied into a number of difference services.

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/13/china-cctv-bbc-reporter/ [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/22/world/asia/china-surveill... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7UKYUTke58

zachguo3• 7 years ago

I'm fed up with those people who think they understand China simply because they have read a sci-fi novel written by an Englishman before modern China has been founded. China's system is so complicated and so far from a heavy-handed police state.

sirmike_• 7 years ago

China's system is so complicated and so far from a heavy-handed police state.

No. China is not free. I am sorry you are fed up. But I bet millions of victims of Chinese oppression are in much dire condition and wish they could be fed up and not dead or disappeared. Xi Jinping is a dope. The amount of articulation of control China has over the its citizens is chilling. Defending China, Fuck the Chinese govt.

I can say that and face zero repercussions, publically. You cannot say that in China and expect to be ok. I hope the Chinese people rise up one day and figure out a better form of governance for themselves.

NicoJuicy2• 7 years ago

I'll make it simple for you.

I don't think Taiwan agrees with you

tfha2• 7 years ago

I've been to multiple events in China and the chilling effect is very apparent and very strong in China's cities.

zwaps2• 7 years ago

I am neither American nor Chinese, but there is a qualitative difference.

In the USA, i can say whatever I damn please. In China, I can not talk about certain topics. Whether or not both CCP and FBI bug my phone, I do not know. However, China is super oppressive when it comes to freedom.

zachguo3• 7 years ago

Funny fact, this comment was upvoted to double digits during US day time then downvoted to 1 after East Asia day time.

Causality1• 7 years ago

You realize Americans joke about 9/11 on the internet all the time, right? You can go to YouTube right now and find 9/11 meme compilations. Point aside, "we should come let them do it again" is a radically different statement than "I'm going to do what they did". The former is a complaint; the latter is a threat.

scilro3• 7 years ago

Of course I realize that, but America's free speech protections are the exception and not the rule. (Not making a value judgment here)

Jedi72• 7 years ago

Damn, I sure hope nobody screenshots this or I wont be able to fly a plane into the Sydney Opera house like I'm planning to do next week.

danShumway5• 7 years ago

Clearly, a bit of a different story than what's implied in this article.

Is it?

I would classify both of those as satirical comments (albeit offensive ones). I'm not sure how familiar you are with the US, but it would not be considered socially acceptable here for the police to question you about comments like this made in, say, a private Facebook message.

It definitely would not be acceptable for police in the US to arrest someone over this; that would be a very clear 1st Amendment violation.

tepidandroid4• 7 years ago

You wouldn’t satirize the Nanjing massacre in China in the same way you wouldn’t satirize the Holocaust in Germany.

tfha2• 7 years ago

The point was that the arrest happened after the messages got exposed on social media, and not just after the words were uttered in private

meowface• 7 years ago

Just because that particular example was misreported doesn't necessarily mean surveillance of WeChat private messages isn't occurring.

temporory• 7 years ago

WeChat knows what I am reading. It would discover I am doing research for this article.

Hate to say it, but this is the same with Facebook. The only difference is the government aspect. I think all social products ultimately aim for this. I can definitely see Facebook heading this direction very soon.

ssnistfajen5• 7 years ago

Facebook, Google, and Apple would all do the same thing WeChat/AliPay did if regulations in the West moved faster and were more accommodating.

Nobody mandated the author to order delivery, follow social media, buy movie tickets, do online shopping, pay rent, use bikeshare, call cabs, etc, etc, etc. through WeChat. They are, for the most part, services owned by companies other than Tencent. WeChat just compiles a giant menu for users to link their accounts from these services into WeChat. These gateways exist because consumers find it more convenient than quitting WeChat and opening another app/website.

It's perfectly healthy to be concerned about the impact of centralized tech giants on our daily lives but so far all I'm seeing is fearmongering about this ever-more-elusive "dystopia" which coincidentally seems to only exist in a place that's easy for the English-speaking world to hate on.

RandomGuyDTB• 7 years ago

If every one of my friends and even my employer used an app to conduct business and I refused to get it no matter how much they tried to tell me to because I was concerned about my privacy I'd be ostracized. This did happen to me with Facebook to an extent, and Facebook isn't nearly as much of a mammoth as WeChat. Stop pretending it's a choice.

powerapple7• 7 years ago

Just choose to use wechat for messaging, and use apps for everything else. And stop complaining about why wechat is getting popular for other people. If your friends are on Facebook, it is not your problem to worry about. It is like if your friend is dating a girl you don’t like, get over it. People made their choices already.

ssnistfajen5• 7 years ago

Why did you assume I "pretended" it's a choice? It IS a choice and it has always been. Most people just decided the trade-off of being denied employment and other opportunities is not worth preserving whatever privacy these tech giants are trying to "steal" from you. Market economies rarely cater to the few. That has always been the exception and not the norm.

dlivingston2• 7 years ago

Is this fear-mongering?

"Despite WeChat’s somewhat more private design, Amnesty International, in a 2016 report on user privacy, gave WeChat zero out of a 100 for its lack of freedom of speech protection and lack of end-to-end encryption. By comparison, Facebook scored 73. People are regularly arrested for messages they send in supposedly “private” group chats. In 2017, two people were arrested in Nanjing for separate instances of making satirical comments referring the massacre in the city by the Japanese in 1937.5 One person, seeking a job in the city and down on his luck, wrote in a group for job-seekers that “Nanjing is a pit. We should let the Japanese come slaughter again.” He was detained two days later. A similar case that same year saw a 31-year-old man jailed for joking about joining the Islamic State in a group-chat. He was arrested under China’s anti-terrorism laws and given a 9-month prison sentence."

ssnistfajen5• 7 years ago

If you talk about joining the IS in the West using non-encrypted messaging services, you are more than likely to end up on a watchlist or receive a visit from law enforcement (depending on context and severity) as well. Expressing sentiments akin to Holocaust denial or any other mass tragedy also more than likely invites action from the platform you are on depending on their policy.

People are being persecuted by law enforcement because it is the very entity that mandated WeChat to do this in the first place. I don't see how placing the whole blame on WeChat itself is rational at all.

Barrin923• 7 years ago

Is this fear-mongering?

depends on whether the action was taken by wechat or someone reported the user from the group, because if that's the case all the encryption in the world isn't going to help you. (and it's not particularly unlikely depending on the size)

Also as the other user suggested, you probably shouldn't advocate joining isis on a platform in a country where said action is illegal, wechat like any other company anywhere has the duty to enforce the law.

sonnyblarney3• 7 years ago

No, you are not going to get arrested in America for making a joke about George Washington.

Enough with the irresponsible moral equivalence arguments.

There are glaringly material differences between 'Google software scanning your mails to target ads' and 'the police having $2/hour folks reading private chats to arrest you for totally arbitrary reasons'.

Barrin923• 7 years ago

No, you are not going to get arrested in America for making a joke about George Washington.

If someone leaks you joking about repeating a historical terrorist attack the chances that the police at least pay you a visit is very high, in the United States and other Western countries.

There's actually a whole array of news articles you can find on your search engine of choice about arrests after people made social media posts about threatening politicians. Which I might add, joke or not is very reasonable.

aembleton• 7 years ago

It's not the US, but UK police do carry out arrests for jokes on social media:

- https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2014/12/23/glasgow-crash-tw...

- https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-43478925

- https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/06/02/social_media_arrest...

quotz• 7 years ago

I would highly recommend following @0xDUDE on twitter, he always posts surveillance leaks in China. He found out that WeChat conversations are sent to the local police depending where the user is, and there are employee farms manually reading the conversations... The same way factory workers in China are paid 2 dollars a day, employee farms for conversation/data reading are doing the same...

1. Link for @0xDUDE is: https://twitter.com/0xdude?lang=en 2. Link for a great thread regarding China spying: https://twitter.com/docligot/status/1111293482629398528?lang...

jagrsw• 7 years ago

There's a great Polish sci-fi novel - Paradyzja (~/Paradise/) (wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradyzja) which describes ever-eavesdropped society. In the end, the society develops a metalanguage (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koalang) to evade automatic systems which record and analyze all written and spoken communications (even at peoples' homes).

I wonder if WeChat users already developed something similar.

max_im• 7 years ago

It's definitely getting closer to that point - for example winnie the pooh is a popular meme used to make fun of uncle Xi but it's hard to police given that it's a children's cartoon. It hasn't stopped the aggressive censoring of pictures of winnie the pooh (no joke) but it has definitely presented a challenge. Using vague historical anecdotes and rarely used imagery is a traditional Chinese mode of communication - in modern days you can see it in action via the aggressively close reading people do of CCP mouthpiece newspapers - the use of certain terms signal a greater ideological shift which people will then try to adapt to/guess at. Personally I'm curious about how this mode of communication will evolve given the current development of automated policing algorithms which will undoubtedly take context into account.

mensetmanusman• 7 years ago

The Chinese already do that with regards to ‘winnie the pooh’ in reference to their leader (and when that was blocked, further obscure poetic language).

I think the govt. is happy with this change, because it dramatically slows down communication rates if people have to have built-in encryption/decryption parsing in their speech.

Also, if you accidentally inform a government agent of the code, so to say, you disappear and the in-group has to change their coding language again.

m-p-32• 7 years ago

I'm wondering if we could develop some kind of encryption / steganographic system that would hide the true meaning of a sentence behind somewhat sensical human-readable text to lower suspicion and automated detection.

qwerty456127• 7 years ago

BTW do Chinese phones let you turn GPS off? I never turn it on except when I actually need it so apps probably don't know where I am.

millettjon• 7 years ago

They can still track you to some extent from cell towers and wifi.

evidencepi2• 7 years ago

I posted a bunch of pictures from the Hong Kong protests in the past couple days.

It shocked me that all of my posts were blocked immediately, people can see my old posts but not those new posts with the "sensitive" pictures.

I downloaded those pictures from bloomberg, so I am sure the wechat / tencent is running some web crawler and ML to identify the news picture from the online sources and block them automatically. Still there is some way to get around, by assembling a group of pictures together and adding some noise (adding words, etc).

What's more, the regime is not only monitoring wechat or weibo, it's monitoring non-domestic social medias like twitter as well, for example here's a pictures showing a huge screen, where a lot of tweets are being process my some NLP algorithm, and outputs a result showing whether the tweet is positive, neutral or negative towards the regime [1].

This is how a totalitarianism would apply technology, it uses everything it could to control the people in order to survive.

China is now going full throttle to become a nazi + commie country, it's THE CANCER for everyone else who loves freedom and democracy.

There will be only two possibilities in the 21st century, either the Communist China crashed like USSR, or a war will happen between the China and the west. Hong Kong is literally the frontline of the battlefield.

[1] https://chinadigitaltimes.net/chinese/2018/09/%E3%80%90%E7%A...

evidencepi2• 7 years ago

I think it will take a long time for the west to really stand up against china, because of the economy interest, the lack of transparency and culture / language barrier. Until china hits the pearl harbor, it will get worse and worse.

Disclaimer: I am from china, living in the US now.

Iwan-Zotow• 7 years ago

looks exactly like fecebook to me

WeChat is Watching: Living in China with the app that knows everything about me

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