Safest way of using WeChat on Android? (lemmy.ca)

submitted 7 months ago by bionicjoey@lemmy.ca to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

81 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I live in Canada. My girlfriend is Chinese (also living in Canada), and while we are able to communicate via SMS, her mobile carrier isn't the best, and so there have often been issues for us with regular texting. She expressed a strong preference to use WeChat, at least as a backup option for when texting fails us. While I have some pretty significant reservations, it's not the hill I want to die on. So my question is: what can be done to use WeChat without compromising my whole phone? I'm okay with it if our conversations aren't private, but I'd like to know that I'm not giving unfettered access to all of my phone's systems and data to the CCP. What can be done to limit the reach of this ubiquitous app on my device?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[-] bionicjoey@lemmy.ca 2 points 7 months ago

Yeah she's an iPhone user. And she wants to use WeChat because it's like second nature to Chinese people. It's as normal to them as email is to us in the west. They are totally desensitized to the digital privacy concerns.

She has WhatsApp as well, but it's not set up properly on her phone so she doesn't get notifications for it. Plus I'm pretty sure it wouldn't work if she traveled back to China.

this post was submitted on 19 Apr 2024

72 points (95.0% liked)

Privacy

31987 readers

366 users here now

A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
Don't promote proprietary software
Try to keep things on topic
If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
Be nice :)

Related communities

Chat rooms

[Matrix/Element]Dead
Discord

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS