But Chinese tech companies like Tencent are now global, meaning this dragnet is believed to be sweeping up information about users from outside China. had unparalleled capabilities to monitor Internet traffic passing through servers within its borders. World China Used Twitter To Disrupt Hong Kong Protests, But Efforts Began Years Earlierįor decades, the U.S. He says the system resembles the global surveillance methods used by the U.S. Most of the messages were sent inside China, but more than 19 million of them had been sent from people outside the country, mostly from the U.S., Taiwan, South Korea and Australia. Each message had been tagged with a GPS location, and many included users' national identification numbers. This March, Gevers found a Chinese database storing more than 1 billion WeChat conversations, including more than 3.7 billion messages, and tweeted out his findings. The Dutch researcher Gevers has studied Chinese social platforms as well and has exposed a large number of online vulnerabilities in their networks. More than 19 million were sent from outside □□ /Va8Lfk3dnw- Victor Gevers April 22, 2019 68% of the English messages were sent in China. 98% of the Chinese messages had a GPS location in China. "The shocking piece is that China is exporting that kind of censorship to other parts of the world."įrom 3.784.309.399 messages, 3.698.798.784 were written in Chinese.ĥ9.378.236 in English and 26.132.379 in another language. "It isn't shocking that China has that kind of censorship," he says. He declined to share his full name because he fears his criticism could draw retaliation against himself or his family by the authorities in China, where he travels often and where most of his family lives. "It doesn't matter where the user is, as long as I send a message to more than three people, my message cannot be seen in any group," says Stephen, a Chinese American technology professional. citizens who have been blocked from sending messages in WeChat groups or had their accounts frozen earlier this year, despite registering with U.S. Zhou is not the only one experiencing recent issues. Tencent saw revenue climb 13% in the third quarter, the slowest growth since it went public in 2004, hurt by a regulatory crackdown that has impacted its games pipeline as well as its app updates."The intention of keeping people safe by building these systems goes out the window the moment you don't secure them at all," says Victor Gevers, the Dutch co-founder of the nonprofit GDI Foundation, an open-source data security collective. Weixin will also start to allow users to pay with China’s digital yuan, Tencent said, as the country’s central bank steps up its push to develop its own digital currency. More than 700 million users have used Weixin mini programs tailored to combat the pandemic, such as ones used to book COVID-19 tests, the company said. Total transaction volumes via those programs grew 897% over the same period, it added. Weixin said at its annual developers conference in Guangzhou that the number of active mini programs operated by overseas merchants had more than tripled over the past two years. The mini programs – which look and operate much like apps on Apple Inc’s iOS and Google’s Android operating systems, but are less data intensive – are key to Tencent’s efforts to build its e-commerce operations. That represents a 13% increase from a year earlier, much slower than the 33% growth seen in 2020, according to previous figures released by Tencent. GUANGZHOU, China -China’s dominant messaging app, Tencent Holdings’ Weixin, known as WeChat outside the country, said on Thursday that average daily active users for its mini programs hit 450 million in 2021.
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