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?

  • @TheAnonymouseJoker@lemmy.ml
    -1•7 months ago

    And yeah really, try to convince your wife girlfriend to use signal instead. Or hell, even whatsapp is miles ahead.

    It is interesting that you promote Facebook over WeChat in a privacy community, even though you have a Chinese wife. Just how far is racism embedded in your head to go through hoops saying things like this? Is it objective analysis to claim WeChat (China) is worse than Facebook (USA)? Or that Signal, something based in USA, using USA servers, promoted by Elon Musk and using a shady MobileCoin crypto system, is so great?

    Encryption of messages is not a thing on WeChat, but then neither is WeChat being used to extract meta data and use it to commit genocides or bomb countries, like USA based messengers do.