Is WeChat spying on user conversations?

If you frequently use WeChat, you might want to be careful with your conversations. A new bombshell report alleges that the popular Chinese messaging platform is spying on messages from both users from China and other foreign countries to fuel its censorship algorithm. That's a pretty scary accusation.

WeChat spying on users

This report comes from Citizen Lab and claims that WeChat is monitoring conversations even outside of China to keep its censorship algorithm functional.

Since WeChat is based in China, it's pretty much a given that it's monitoring conversations for politically sensitive topics and content and will censor them accordingly. While that's not a great look to the rest of the world, it's a very common practice for internet services in China. But where things get worse are how WeChat is apparently scanning conversations of people outside of China in order to monitor for the same censor-worthy content.

This keeps people outside of China from sending content to Chinese users that the Chinese government would disapprove of, but this type of scanning and monitoring isn't disclosed at all to users. It's expected in China, but people in other parts of the world don't naturally expect that kind of invasive snooping.

If these findings end up being true, it could spell out some big implications for WeChat's app store listings on mobile platforms. Keep an eye out on what you're sending in chat apps.

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