Chinese tech giant Tencent is ramping up its efforts to protect the data privacy of WeChat users. The company announced that it is tightening privacy controls on all third-party apps on its platform starting this week. This will include restricting certain app rights that collect sensitive personal information of WeChat users.
The Shenzhen-based company explained that it will only allow a small group of developers to have apps that access certain personal information. All developers will also be required to provide details explanations of the types of information their apps are collecting and how they go about collecting data.
WeChat's legal team mentioned in a post on social media that apps or mini-programs, running on its platform will also be allowed to collect data on a "need-to-know" basis. The company stated that protecting the privacy of its users is its top priority, which is why it had decided to tighten up security to ensure a safer experience for all users.
The move comes after public criticism over certain mini-apps that had attempted to collect private information using the ongoing viral epidemic as an excuse. Tencent's "do-everything" online platform hosts several apps that offer different services and recently some developers have taken advantage of the widely used platform to collect personal data without user permission. Since the start of the year, the company had reportedly intercepted 3,252 illicit attempts to collect data from 2,392 mini-programs.
One of the most common ways these apps collect data is by providing misleading links that then give them access to a device's data after it is clicked or opened. According to WeChat, these types of practices violate their terms of service. To prevent link baiting, the company stated that all links can no longer be opened directly within the platform. Users who want to open links will have to manually copy them and open them in other browsers instead.
Tencent's multi-purpose messaging and social media platform is currently one of the world's largest standalone mobile apps with over 1.1 billion active users. Due to its scale and the different types of services it offers, the company has been accused of using its market dominance to monopolize different industries.
As the novel coronavirus continues to spread, WeChat has seen an the influx of users as companies move their office operations online to avoid their employees from being infected. Some developers have taken advantage of this fact and the growing fears by creating misleading apps to get access to personal user data.
