Not to be confused with WeeChat. The curses terminal irc client.
Would anyone really be confused by that?
WeChat is Watching: Living in China with the app that knows everything about me
41–50 of 306 posts
Re: WeChat is Watching: Living in China with the app that knows everything about me
#42So compared to this Google looks like a mom and pop shop when it comes to data collection..but now think about the frame here. It is done in China not in the /free/ world..
yes.
nobody complained when US (and everyone else later on) required online forms for visa requests. full of google Analytics tags and all.
Re: WeChat is Watching: Living in China with the app that knows everything about me
#43I go to China often but it's been two years now. I don't look forward to the next visit for this very reason—I'll need this to pay for any and everything. I'm not going back.
At least last time I was there, you needed a Chinese bank account to link. A quick search suggests there are a few workarounds but you probably still can't just add a foreign credit card.
Re: WeChat is Watching: Living in China with the app that knows everything about me
#44Going to China soon and everybody tells me WeChat will help me a lot over there. However, I cannot create my account without a "voiceprint". It wants me to read some numbers to fingerprint my voice. Apparently I cannot skip this step and I am not very comfortable with that.
I actually find Alipay easier to use for payments and it is easier to set up. If you don't want to chat I would use it instead.
Re: WeChat is Watching: Living in China with the app that knows everything about me
#45> It knows my biometric information; it knows the very contours of my face.
I was under the impression that Face ID does not leak such information to whatever app is using it?
Re: WeChat is Watching: Living in China with the app that knows everything about me
#46A few things worth being aware of Alibaba does not own WeChat but rather's it's competition Alipay. It does not have any access to WeChat data. So far the "social credit" on seems to be mostly based on how much you buy and it only seems to give you discounts to massively overpriced products (similar to a credit card reward system). You don't really download apps in Wechat but rather add a link more like a Facebook Ap…
> You don't need to read since you can just send messages How can illiterate people send messages?
same way toddlers install apps: voice and voice to text input.
also in china older generations migth be literate but not capable of typing in a phone/computer.
Re: WeChat is Watching: Living in China with the app that knows everything about me
#47> If it wasn’t for the fact that I grew up in London and use a VPN to jump the great firewall to keep in touch with my friends at home and use Google, I could go entire days without leaving WeChat.
I wonder what VPN people use in China to access Google. When I was there last month, I couldn't find a single one that worked for more than a few days.
Re: WeChat is Watching: Living in China with the app that knows everything about me
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
WeChat is a private company owned by Tencent.
I mean.... the govt can check whatever they want on the WeChat logs. And the populace is pretty accepting of this for security reasons (if you aren’t going off the “government can be corrupt and abuse it’s powers” principle its actually kinda hard to make the privacy argument!)
"government can be corrupt and abuse it’s powers”
The thing is, this is not some hypothetically argument, but governments ARE corrupt and abuse their powers. Even in our awesome democratic western systems. In china much more. And that the general chinese population is used to it and therefore does not mind so much, is just that they are used to it.
Re: WeChat is Watching: Living in China with the app that knows everything about me
#49> At 9:27, once I’ve brushed my teeth, answered a few messages, and wiped the sleep from my eyes, I order a coffee through WeChat. There’s a payments window on the app, and when you click on it you see various options, some proprietary to WeChat and some which are independent apps that run on WeChat’s platform. I open the Meituan delivery app and scroll through all the coffee options around me. I order an Americano.…
WeChat basically created a platform, allows third party apps to have their html5 version of app in WeChat platform. Basically the same as Google Login. You can choose to use their independent version of app directly to do the same thing. WeChat is very successful on this platform, I can imagine future phones just need WeChat to work properly and all the apps in it will function. Those apps are not WeChat or Tencent apps though, just web apps work inside WeChat.
Re: WeChat is Watching: Living in China with the app that knows everything about me
#50Going to China soon and everybody tells me WeChat will help me a lot over there. However, I cannot create my account without a "voiceprint". It wants me to read some numbers to fingerprint my voice. Apparently I cannot skip this step and I am not very comfortable with that.
What if you slightly change your voice everytime you're using it?