| Disclaimer partly in response to "has anyone criticizing it has actually tried weChat": I use WeChat daily. WeChat is an amazing App with a lot of features. Using it for payment is convenient. It's video Chat is so much better than Skype in terms of stability etc. (Consider the network condition in China that's certainly a miracle.) But there is certainly something Orwellian in WeChat. WeChat has built-in browser, which they do some censorship on links people click on. I put in a link from cn.nytimes.com and I got this: http://i.imgur.com/jMGZZSH.png (I clicked this link in China and got that, my friend clicked that link in WeChat while being in U.S. and get through fine. magic) Please note this is not even the usual GFW business, GFW doesn't return something like that at all. The text in the pic says "it was reported by many people", my feeling is that any link from cn.nytimes.com would got that no matter whether people reported or not. What is more, they do this to Taobao, the major Chinese online business website, held by their competitor Alibaba (they are competitor in the same sense Google, Apple and Facebook are competitors, not because of they are both in the same niche field), namely if you send a link from taobao.com (e.g. https://item.taobao.com/item.htm?id=531244443418), you end up seeing this: http://imgur.com/e3pHmUe.png where the text says "Please copy this link and paste it in the browser to visit." (On the other hand, WeChat has a "Shopping" entrance to taobao's competitor jd.com right within the App.) [The actual reason is complicated, Taobao blocked UserAgent:WeChat long time ago when WeChat is small, but now it's the other way around.] Although I won't put it as 1984, I'd say it's more like "Brave New World". With WeChat one can do whatever he/she wants "as long as being a good citizen" (and not using WeChat's competitor's service too much). It could be turned into a 1984-world very easily -- e.g. You may noticed that I'm paranoid enough to cut the ISP information when showing the screenshot, but what if the background image contains information of my WeChat ID? After all it's only 4-5 bytes at most. (To those who think I'm overthinking, this is already happening to Alibaba's internal network to prevent information leak.) That's why apps like Signal/Telegram always have a small user base in China, no matter how much better WeChat are compared to them. |
