Sunday, October 13, 2019

"Chinese app on Xi’s ideology allows data access to users’ phones, report says"

WaPo:
The Chinese Communist Party appears to have “superuser” access to the entire data on more than 100 million Android-based cellphones through a back door in a propaganda app that the government has been promoting aggressively this year.

An examination of the coding of the app used by phones running the Android operating system shows it enables authorities to retrieve messages and photos from users’ phones, browse their contacts and Internet history, and activate an audio recorder inside the devices.

...

The party, led by President Xi Jinping, launched the app, called Study the Great Nation, in January. The name is a pun because the Chinese word for study — “xuexi” — contains the authoritarian leader’s family name.