China censors chat users outside China
report says messages discussing press freedom campaign blocked
Customer Success Testimonial: Recovery is Everything
China’s largest internet firm, Tencent, is reportedly now censoring messages sent by international users of its popular WeChat service.
The Shenzhen-based web giant, which accrued $US1.8bn in revenues in the last quarter, is one of the few Chinese online companies trying to expand its footprint overseas.
Although its QQ instant messaging service has around 800 million domestic users and its web portal of the same name is one of China’s most popular, the Whatsapp-like platform WeChat (or Weixin) is its most prominent product beyond the Middle Kingdom.
It has now emerged that messages sent between users outside China will be blocked when they contain certain words.
TechInAsia sent test messages containing the Chinese characters for Southern Weekly – the newspaper at the heart of recent protests over press freedom – and found them blocked when sent between users in Thailand and Singapore.
The error message – in English – apparently reads: “The message ‘南方周末’ you sent contains restricted words. Please check it again.”
Tencent last month launched a BlackBerry version of the app, in an effort to tap users in south-east Asian countries where the RIM device is still popular, so it’s obviously keen to expand its reach abroad.
Although English language messages are not blocked on WeChat – yet – international users may still be troubled by the news and many are likely to decide against putting their faith in a service where messages are routed through Chinese servers.
WeChat has been singled out in the past on similar matters. A South China Morning Post piece from last November detailed allegations from human rights activist Hu Jia that the police were snooping in real-time on his messages – although it hasn’t been proven that this was done with Tencent’s knowledge.
Tencent didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment. ®
COMMENTS
Why anyone would trust a Chinese company with their data is beyond me... it's almost as bad as trusting an American one... both have draconian data laws and brutish police tactics... but at least China is honest about it.
Not so sinister
I think I'd rather a nice honest rebuttal from a foreign company to my beloved regime’s approach:
Menace every company I interact with into silently sequestering every utterance I ever make anywhere into an immense archive for The Ministry of Love, Paedophilia Prevention, Counter-Terrorism and Protection to mine at their leisure. Thus by the time my turn comes 'round to be deemed a terrorist/paedophile, they'll have amassed all the data they need from which to cherry-pick sufficient "grounds" for the thought police to smash my door in at 5am and whisk me away for a nice stretch of "correction".
Re: they only follow the US
Yeah, going after tax evaders by requesting information on bank accounts - which every other nation happily provides - is identical to censoring political speech between two foreign parties. Oh, the poor, beleaguered Swiss, trampled by the hegemony of the Evil Empire... *back of hand to forehead in 'woe is me' gesture*
IT infrastructure monitoring strategies
What you need to know about cloud backup
Enabling efficient data center monitoring
Agentless Backup is Not a Myth
Customer Success Testimonial: Recovery is Everything
