WeChat has clarified its position on privacy. In this case, it’s that there is no privacy and all user data is freely shared with the Chinese government. As a Chinese company, this isn’t actually anything surprising. Although, the change in the privacy policy to make this abundantly clear is something unusual.
The new policy clarifies that WeChat complies with “applicable laws and regulations”. Meaning that it doesn’t even try to fight against the invasive practices of China’s online regulators. This policy also spells out precisely what kind of data the app stores on its servers.
In this case, that information happens to be “information about what you have searched for and looked at while using WeChat,” and “people you’ve communicated with and the time, data and duration of your communications”. Which is pretty much everything that’s done on a chat app.
Refusing this updated privacy policy prevents the user from actually using WeChat. Only by going back and accepting the policy can the user resume chatting and providing the Chinese government with information.
WeChat is considered to be the least secure messaging service in operation at this time. There is absolutely no end-to-end encryption and receives a large amount of censorship from the Chinese government. If anything, this new privacy policy should be taken as a good reason to avoid using WeChat if there are alternatives (which China has conveniently censored and banned).
[Source: The Epoch Times]
