Privacy

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Safest way of using WeChat on Android? (lemmy.ca)

submitted 7 months ago by bionicjoey@lemmy.ca to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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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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[–] umbrella@lemmy.ml 2 points 7 months ago (2 children)

+1 for signal but i doubt whatsapp is ahead at all

[–] viking@infosec.pub 14 points 7 months ago (2 children)

Whatsapp uses end to end encryption and is far from as intrusive as wechat.

[–] jet@hackertalks.com 4 points 7 months ago (1 children)

So they say, but its closed source, so its hard to verify.

[–] viking@infosec.pub 10 points 7 months ago

Nah it's rather easy to do and has been done by security experts. If your phone is a rooted android, you can do it yourself using PCAPdroid, it's basically a network logger that allows to install a trusted certificate as a local proxy and go man in the middle on yourself. That way you can decrypt the https traffic between your phone and the whatsapp server.

[–] umbrella@lemmy.ml 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

whatsapp is certainly backdoored, its closed source and unverifiable.

[–] umami_wasbi@lemmy.ml 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

then so does your claim, unverifiable

[–] umbrella@lemmy.ml 1 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

my claim is completely open, unlike whatsapp

[–] umami_wasbi@lemmy.ml 4 points 7 months ago (1 children)

At least Whaysapp have the content encrypted

[–] umbrella@lemmy.ml 0 points 7 months ago

its certainly backdoored