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“WeChat tries to keep all the users there by design - it provides seemingly well-rounded services,” he says. In March, WeChat blocked links from popular video-sharing app Douyin, and later made it temporarily impossible to share links to more than 30 video-sharing apps it also blocked links from Tencent’s competitors, including e-commerce giant Alibaba and news aggregator Jinri Toutiao. In addition to privacy, the product manager is also bothered by the way the ever-more-powerful WeChat controls what information users see.
There’s evidence that this could be the case: In March, search giant Baidu’s CEO Robin Li sparked public anger with his comments that Chinese people are often willing to trade their privacy for convenience, safety, and efficiency. He believes that a growing number of people in China are now becoming wary of sharing too much data with one app.
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He compares the mini-ecosystem created within WeChat to “The Matrix” - the 1999 sci-fi movie in which humans are imprisoned inside of a simulated reality - and says that those who don’t use WeChat are like inhabitants of “Zion,” the only city with a small population of Matrix-rejectors. He tried WeChat for a week back in 2011, before it was officially released, but promptly uninstalled it.
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The man, who is in his 30s, is so concerned about privacy that he asked to be anonymous and instead go by the random, unique code 3MzYWI5bTcxaTM that allows him to track his quotes. Citizen Lab, a research group from the University of Toronto, says it has found evidence of the app silencing content.Īnother WeChat-eschewer who works as a product manager at a state-owned internet company has ditched the app in favor of Telegram, an encrypted messaging app that requires a VPN - or virtual private network - to scale China’s Great Firewall. Experts say “internet logs” don’t include the contents of the messages themselves, but that didn’t prevent an outcry in January when the chairman of Chinese car giant Geely said Tencent founder Pony Ma “must be watching our messages on WeChat every single day.” Tencent, meanwhile, has denied that it stores or analyzes users’ conversations on the platform, although its privacy policy notes that it may share users’ personal information if requested by the authorities. Zhu’s data fears aren’t entirely unfounded: China’s new cybersecurity law, which came into effect a year ago, requires tech companies to store internet logs of when and where users accessed their servers for at least six months, to aid law enforcement. Her parents don’t understand her choice and have tried to persuade her to get on the ever-present app. When she travelled abroad with her colleagues in the spring, the others could easily contact each other on WeChat using the available WiFi, but if they wanted to get hold of her, they had to shell out extra to call or text, she recalls with guilt. For Chinese, life without WeChat can mean being hamstrung both at work and in daily life.Įvery time Zhu gets a new client, she has to warn them about her lifestyle choice - otherwise they would expect to contact her through WeChat. By Liu Zheng, Lin Qiqing, Julia Hollingsworth, and Daniel Holmes/Sixth Toneīut as WeChat grows ever more ubiquitous and indispensable in everyday life, there’s a cost to the few who opt not to use it - far beyond the party invites and memes they might miss out on were they to quit one of WeChat’s overseas counterparts, like Facebook. Users find that China’s super-app WeChat can be a double-edged sword. “I know my data will be collected somehow in the end, but I just want to have more dignity,” she says, linking her heightened concern for privacy to her legal education.
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The WeChat-objector lives the life of a Luddite, without e-commerce giant Alibaba’s mobile payment app Alipay or ride-hailing app Didi, which both require registration using a phone number tied to the user’s ID.
“I hope to create more of a challenge when the government tries to map our big data,” 36-year-old Zhu, who did not want to give her real name for privacy reasons, tells Sixth Tone. Zhu is one in a small minority of smartphone users who has never tried it. In the seven years since WeChat was released by internet giant Tencent, it has seeped into almost every aspect of daily Chinese life, and now boasts over 1 billion monthly users worldwide - just short of the size of China’s total population. But that’s not enough to win over Shanghai lawyer Zhu. In China, you can call a cab, get bubble tea delivered to your door, and even apply to get divorced all on the same social media app: WeChat.