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?
Hard for me to take anything they say seriously when they say Facebook does not contain any trackers:
https://reports.exodus-privacy.eu.org/en/reports/com.facebook.katana/latest/
Edit: I’m not saying WeChat is clean, just that I don’t exactly trust Exodus for tracker reporting.
Exodus does exactly what it’s supposed to. It’s your interpretation of the data that is flawed.
If you actually bothered to read, you would know that it shows 0 trackers because Facebook doesn’t embed their trackers in the SDK, and inject them later once you grant them the permissions to the device, exactly the same way WeChat does.
I did read, and it changed nothing about what I said. Let’s revisit: did it detect Facebook, which I think we can all agree is invasive, as having trackers? No? The “why” of it doesn’t seem particularly relevant as we are just looking for trackers in apps.
https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/9358-using-apps-with-known-trackers-with-no-google-play-services/6