this post was submitted on 19 Apr 2024

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Safest way of using WeChat (lemmy.ca)

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

7 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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?

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

Phone apps are already fairly sandboxed.

Use your phone's permission system, look at the app's permissions, and set them as strict as the app will allow you to while continuing to function. I don't see any particularly scary permissions that aren't optional (looking in Google Play/the Android permissions set).

Pretty much anything beyond that you're wasting your time unless you want to carry two phones.

Edit: I see you went with Shelter; hadn't heard of that either. Probably overkill, but as long as it doesn't cause problems/the app works for you, go for it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

Well it means that if I do grant a permission to the app like for example file storage access to send my gf a funny meme I downloaded, it doesn't get access to all of the pictures and files on my device.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

That's an oxymoron. Apart from having a dedicated device, you can't really sandbox the app since it requires basic permissions to function that give access to core phone functions. See https://reports.exodus-privacy.eu.org/en/reports/com.tencent.mm/latest/
You can try to limit permissions of some features that you don't intend to use.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

See Exodus...

Hard for me to take anything they say seriously when they say Facebook does not contain any trackers:

We have not found code signature of any tracker we know in the application.

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

If you actually bothered to read...

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

Use an old phone for it?