Skip to main content

Tag: surveillance

Navigating Risks From Chinese Apps

Written by Zack Chiang on . Posted in News and Trends.

An investigation published last month by Taiwanese independent outlet The Reporter (報導者) found that the Chinese navigation app Amap, also known as Gaode Map (高德地圖), transmits users’ data to servers inside China, according to the outlet’s analysis of the app’s network traffic. The investigation found that the app transmits location data, along with a tracking code capable of identifying users across other apps.

The outlet’s reporting substantiates the risks facing Taiwanese and international users of Chinese-developed map services more broadly, showing that even routine consumer apps from China can double as channels for state data collection — supported by Chinese laws that oblige companies to share user data with security and intelligence agencies on request.

By testing how Amap could pose a threat to users’ personal data security, The Reporter analyzed transmitted data packets, including their content and the frequency with which they were sent to the server, and compared them with those generated by other map services, including NaviKing, owned by the Taiwanese company KingwayTek Technology, and Google Maps.

Screenshot from the Amap website, picture above.

The result, conducted through tests using the same phone, routes and internet, revealed that Amap uploaded the data roughly every three seconds, while Google Maps and NaviKing did so around every 30 seconds and 22 minutes respectively. Apart from uploading location data, The Reporter also found that sensor information, such as phone brightness and altitude, was transmitted.

“CAID,” a deceiving code used to track users’ data by the China Advertising Association (中国广告协会) and the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (中国信通院), or CAICT, was identified when running the packet analysis, even after deleting and reinstalling the app. The code is embedded once the app is downloaded, without asking users’ permission.

Amap generated public discussion in April this year, when it released a new function — a detailed prediction of traffic light countdowns in Taipei and Kaohsiung, two major cities in Taiwan. The same month, Taiwan’s Ministry of Digital Affairs (MODA) announced a ban on the use of the app in government agencies, in accordance with the Cyber Security Management Act.

Amap, owned by the Alibaba Group, was found by MODA to exhibit 11 cybersecurity risk behaviors. Amap’s overseas privacy policy states that personal data is stored on servers located in Singapore or China, and could be shared with partners and service providers in China.

Chinese enterprises have played a leading role in the Digital Silk Road, a Chinese-led project to share its technology with the world under the Belt and Road Initiative, according to Article 19, an international human rights organization. The BeiDou satellite navigation system, a Chinese-made technology used by Amap, has reached agreements within the Indo-Pacific region, including in Thailand and Cambodia. Cambodian human rights organizations have also raised concerns about the risk to transparency, according to Article 19.

Chinese law provides a basis for the state to obtain personal data from private organizations. For example, Article 35 of the Data Security Law of the People’s Republic of China (中华人民共和国数据安全法) states organizations’ obligation to provide information for national security purposes.

Turtles for the Traitors

Written by Dalia Parete on . Posted in News and Trends.

 Last month, an analysis by China Digital Times (CDT), an outlet that tracks Chinese media and censorship, found that the definition of the activities of “external hostile forces” (境外势力) applied by China’s Ministry of State Security has widened to include the most routine activities of daily life. The study of the expanding scope of this decades-old phrase, which has long cast perceived threats to its rule as the work of foreign infiltration, points to a regime obsessed with potential dissent and espionage.

The review, published on June 23 by CDT, examined three years of posts from the official WeChat account of China’s Ministry of State Security (国家安全部), or MSS, the country’s intelligence and domestic security agency. The MSS opened its official WeChat account just over three years ago, in April 2023.

CDT’s review counted more than 30 everyday scenarios the ministry has cast as channels for infiltration. They included intelligence gathering through dating apps, Bluetooth earbuds, paid photography jobs at military and technology expos, employment ads, and study abroad opportunities. Bizarrely, the list even mentioned the possible use of sea turtles fitted with tracking sensors, which were suspected of relaying ocean data to foreign intelligence agents.

The clearest example of the application of this overstretched definition came on April 28, 2026, when the ministry accused two foreign-funded groups of stoking the trend of “lying flat” (躺平), a term referring to the choice by exhausted young Chinese to opt out of the country’s competitive work culture and instead live a laid-back lifestyle. One group, the MSS said, had funded media and think tanks pushing the narrative that “striving equals being exploited” (奋斗=被剥削), while another had bankrolled “lying-flat influencers” who produced videos with slogans like “lying flat is justice” (躺平即正义).

According to CDT, the MSS post marked the first time the ministry had treated a social mood, not concrete acts of espionage, as a security threat.

The phrase “hostile forces” dates to 1948, when the People’s Daily first used a version of it, “class hostile forces” (阶级敌对势力), translating a Soviet-era text. Mao Zedong revived it as “hostile class” (敌对阶级) during the 1957 Anti-Rightist Movement, and it resurfaced at sensitive moments in the decades that followed, including after the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown and the 1999 banning of the Falun Gong spiritual movement. Over the past decade, the phrase has been used to cast Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protests as the outcome of foreign meddling.

Silence Follows Harassment

Written by David Bandurski on . Posted in News and Trends. No Comments on Silence Follows Harassment

Last Friday, InMedia (獨立媒體), one of Hong Kong’s few remaining independent news outlets, published an unusual apology to readers through its newsletter. The outlet said that its normal operations had been disrupted in recent days  by “harassing messages” (滋擾訊息) as it sought to cover hearings looking into the deadly fire at the Wang Fuk Court residential buildings in November last year that killed 168 people. InMedia said in its message that it had filed police reports in two specific cases of harassment by “unidentified persons” (不明人士).  

On Tuesday, online commentator Fung Hei-kin (馮睑乾), a former columnist for Hong Kong’s Apple Daily, noted in a Facebook post that not one mainstream Hong Kong outlet had covered the InMedia story in the four days since the outlet’s disclosure. In fact, the only outlet to cover the news at all, said Fung, had beenEpoch Times, the right-wing American media outlet backed by the Falun Gong religious group — a brief report that added no new information. Fung likened the silence over the InMedia case to that which followed revelations by the independent Hong Kong Journalists Association (HKJA) in September 2024 that reporters from thirteen news organizations had been harassed or threatened in the preceding few months. The chilling effect on the press could clearly be inferred from the silence, said Fung. “The more you think about it,” he wrote, “the more chilling it becomes.”