A rich profile is a complete archive of a follower’s demographic and behavioral history.WeChat is a powerful tool to construct these rich customer profiles. In order to accomplish this feat, the first and most crucial step is to gain a 360-degree, holistic understanding of a customer. In response, brands have been pivoting their marketing from one-size-fits-all blasts to targeted and personalized offerings.
But the report now shows that Tencent is surveilling content with its foreign users to help it tighten censorship at home.In our age of information deluge, buyers are better equipped to make informed purchase decisions than ever before. Previously, there was no evidence that Tencent's censorship machine affected users abroad. The revelations paint a picture of a major technology company in China going beyond its domestic borders to monitor content of its international users. The researchers made clear that while foreign WeChat accounts were not censored, they were subject to surveillance which then informed Tencent's censorship in China. "Such surveillance was discovered by confirming that politically sensitive content which was sent exclusively between non-China-registered accounts was identified as politically sensitive and subsequently censored when transmitted between China-registered accounts, without having previously been sent to, or between, China-registered accounts," Citizen Lab said.
If they were, then users in China would not be able to see that content. They sent images and documents among the non-China registered accounts to see if they would be picked up by Tencent's censorship algorithm. They ran two different scenarios - one where they communicated entirely among non-China-registered accounts and a second where they communicated with a China-registered account. The research organization drew their conclusions based on an experiment they ran. TikTok is owned by Beijing-based ByteDance.Ĭitizen Lab made it clear, however, that "there is no evidence attributing Tencent's surveillance behaviours enforced on international WeChat users to the direction of the Chinese government." Last year, Washington launched a national security review into social media app TikTok's 2017 acquisition of Musica.ly. becomes increasingly worried about the flow of data from apps and services owned by Chinese companies. As a publicly listed global company we hold ourselves to the highest standards, and our policies and procedures comply with all laws and regulations in each country in which we operate," a spokesperson for the company said. "With regard to the suggestion that we engage in content surveillance of international users, we can confirm that all content shared among international users of WeChat is private. Tencent told CNBC it had received the report and takes it "seriously", adding that "user privacy and data security are core values" at the company. Companies that run such services often remove or block content that is likely to offend Beijing.īut Citizen Lab, a research center that is part of the University of Toronto, said in a report published Thursday, that "documents and images shared among non-China-registered accounts are subject to content surveillance and are used to build up the database WeChat uses to censor China-registered accounts." Surveillance and censorship of social media and messaging platforms in China is commonplace.