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...
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...)
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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
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
>“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.
>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.
> 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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'.
"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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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..
> 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.
>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.
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).
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...
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.
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.
> 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.
[+] [-] quotz|6 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] adinobro|6 years ago|reply
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...)
[+] [-] powerapple|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rconti|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] envolt|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] michaelsattler|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iliketosleep|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] skinnymuch|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jstanley|6 years ago|reply
How can illiterate people send messages?
[+] [-] chenster|6 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] scilro|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] artificial|6 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] danShumway|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] gbrown|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ssnistfajen|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] noja|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Causality1|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zachguo|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] beenBoutIT|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] meowface|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Allower|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Jedi72|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dawhizkid|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] rchaud|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] majia|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] m-p-3|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ssnistfajen|6 years ago|reply
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|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sonnyblarney|6 years ago|reply
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'.
[+] [-] dlivingston|6 years ago|reply
"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."
[+] [-] n1000|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] phito|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] driverdan|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jagrsw|6 years ago|reply
I wonder if WeChat users already developed something similar.
[+] [-] max_im|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mensetmanusman|6 years ago|reply
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-3|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] test1235|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] _sveq|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hn23|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ConfusedDog|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] temporory|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] foozed|6 years ago|reply
I was under the impression that Face ID does not leak such information to whatever app is using it?
[+] [-] canada_dry|6 years ago|reply
> (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).
[+] [-] netsharc|6 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] evidencepi|6 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] kylegordon|6 years ago|reply
The iPhone does, WeChat doesn't.
[+] [-] qwerty456127|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] La-ang|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jcbrand|6 years ago|reply
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.