In a study, the researchers found that not only is WeChat spying on the chats of Chinese users, but it’s also looking in on chats from foreigners with the goal of fueling its censorship algorithms...
The company has been known to monitor all of the chats of Chinese users as they come through.
However, the study found that images and documents shared between users outside of China are scanned and flagged for potentially politically sensitive content.
Anything that matches is hashed and flagged when someone shares them with a Chinese account. The flagged content is fed to a machine-learning system that is used to censor content in China. That means WeChat spying isn’t limited to Chinese users, which is quite scary for anyone using the app. more
