WeChat, owned by Chinese internet giant Tencent, is the most popular social media platform in China, and is also widely used in the rest of the world with 1 billion users globally.

However, the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab claimed that the app, which follows China’s stringent censorship rules, also monitors messages shared by people registered with non-China-based phone numbers, feeding the content into censorship algorithms to help build up the database it uses to censor China-based accounts.

The conclusions were based on an experiment that started by sending politically sensitive content between non-China-registered accounts. Afterward, when the same content was sent between China-registered accounts, it was flagged and subsequently censored.

While accounts outside of China were not censored, they are reportedly subject to content surveillance, information on which was not found on any public documents and data access requests, including discussions with Tencent representatives.

Tencent responds

Citizen Lab clarified that there is no evidence that WeChat’s surveillance on international users was directed by the Chinese government. Tencent, however, told CNBC that it received the findings of the research, and that it was taking it “seriously” as the company considers “user privacy and data security” as core values.

https://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/wechat-spying-on-foreigners/