BY EUGENE K. CHOW
Chinese smartphone users have the world at their fingertips. With a few taps, they can order food, message their friends, send money, read the news, play games, hail a taxi, pay off utility bills and more through a single app like WeChat.
But there’s a catch. All this convenience comes with a heavy price: their freedom and privacy.
Thanks to China’s internet giants — Baidu, Tencent and Alibaba — the authoritarian regime now has the means to monitor a user’s every action, purchase, thought, and location in real-time. The Chinese government has long sought the means to more closely keep tabs on its citizens, but with smartphones, people are voluntarily logging their every move for the government in a single, convenient place.
China’s Tech Giants
While tech titans like Google, Amazon, and Facebook have become essential to the daily lives of many Americans, their reach pales in comparison to their Chinese counterparts.
This year, 79.1 percent of all smartphone users in China are expected to use WeChat, a messaging app, with nearly 500 million people using it at least once a month. To put that in perspective, that’s more than the entire population of the United States, Canada and Mexico combined.
But what makes WeChat’s use so significant is how deeply integrated it is with a person’s daily life. Far more than just a messaging app, WeChat is a hub through which Chinese smartphone users access the Internet and other services.
In addition to its basic communication functions, WeChat enables users to order wine, check in for a flight, make a doctor’s appointment, get banking statements, search for books at their local library, donate to charity, pay for things offline, and more. An American venture capitalist described WeChat as being “at every point of your daily contact with the world, from morning until night.”
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2017/08/22/commentary/world-commentary/dark-side-chinas-technology-boom/#.Wdx76WhSyUk
