![]() "Users who register with a phone number outside mainland China are exempt from censorship." ![]() However, WeChat only targets those accounts with China telephone numbers, noted Ronald Deibert, the director of the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto in a recent Washington Post Op-Ed. An NPR report outlined how the government intercepts text messages sent on WeChat, mostly dealing with politics. Indeed, a recent Wired piece investigated China's massive surveillance operation through apps like WeChat, and it wasn't pretty. Trump said he was banning WeChat because sensitive information was being shared with the Chinese government. "For all practical purposes it will be shut down in the U.S., but only in the U.S., as of midnight Monday,” commerce secretary Wilbur Ross said on Fox Business Network Friday. The Trump announcement means downloads of the app, as well as TikTok, won't be allowed to be distributed by Apple and Google as of midnight Sunday.īut that doesn't mean folks with apps already downloaded will be able to continue using them. And, beyond being the top app in China and a way to connect families spread across the globe, WeChat is also used here to do business. It's the only way we communicate."įor her family and many like hers, the ban is "a really big deal." The app has 1 billion users. "I don't even know his phone number," she says. VKontakte and WeChat have many users, but mainly in Russia and China, respectively.Frances He is a Chinese immigrant living near Los Angeles who uses the WeChat app to talk to her brother back home. But with the Trump Administration's Sunday ban on the app, she's going to have to find a new way. AliExpress, the Chinese marketplace of the Alibaba conglomerate, is probably the second most popular in the Netherlands. But the other apps on the blocklist have fewer users in the country. TikTok is extremely popular in the Netherlands, especially among teenagers and young adults. It is unknown how many government officials had these apps installed on their work phones. For example, it is difficult to remove an app remotely if it is already installed on the phone. And technical obstacles sometimes make the ban hard to implement. Some IT departments only blocked TikTok and not the other apps, a source said. The national government tasked its IT departments to block the apps, but sources told NOS that this proved more easily said than done in some cases. The Cabinet announced the ban in March but only mentioned TikTok by name. Contact lists, location data, photos, and documents could be of interest to foreign intelligence services. The AIVD and government worry that foreign governments can use the apps to access customer data and misuse it for espionage. The other five apps are fairly unknown, according to the broadcaster. Two other better-known apps are the Russian social network VKontakte and CapCut, an app from the developer of TikTok for editing videos. The most well-known apps on the blocklist are Social media platforms TikTok, webshop app AliExpress, and chat app WeChat. The blocked apps are all from countries that the intelligence service AIVD believes are guilty of espionage. ![]() The government blocked a total of ten apps - four from China and others from Russia, Iran, and North Korea, sources told NOS. In addition to TikTok, the Dutch government has banned its officials from installing more apps on their work phones, including the Chinese apps AliExpress and WeChat. ![]()
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