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?
Relationships (of all kinds) are about compromise. You have to recognize that outside of the echo chambers in communities like this one, literally nobody cares about digital privacy to the extent that us nerds do. So you can choose to be dogmatic in your approach and alienate yourself from the >99% of people in the world who don’t care, or you can recognize that your own desires for digital privacy need to be weighed against your desires to form meaningful connections with other people.
Personally I prefer to be pragmatic in my approach. I do what I can to look after my privacy within the constraints of actually doing what I need to do to connect with other people. That’s why I made this post. My mind is made up that I’m going to at least try to use WeChat, but within that constraint, I want to do everything in my control to limit the app’s visibility into the rest of my system.