"Tencent’s WeChat to stop routinely accessing photos after a tech influencer publicised the behaviour on Weibo", 9 October 2021

Chinese super app WeChat has promised to stop regularly accessing users’ photos after the behaviour was publicised by an influencer online.

The country’s largest social media app, with 1.25 billion monthly active users (MAUs), was found to be frequently accessing photo galleries even when not in use, sparking privacy concerns. The behaviour was publicised by a tech influencer who goes by the name Hackl0us on the microblogging platform Weibo.

The app, operated by Tencent Holdings, periodically accesses user photos for durations of up to 1 minute each while running in the background, according to Hackl0us, citing conversations from a Telegram chat group. Accompanying screenshots suggested WeChat accesses photo galleries every few hours.

The activity was said to be discovered using Apple’s new “Record App Activity” feature on iOS 15, released last month.

A WeChat representative said the app looks for new images to make it “faster and smoother for users to send photos”. But the company said the app only accesses the full user gallery when authorised by the user.

“Weixin takes user privacy seriously,” the company said in a statement, using the Chinese name for WeChat. “Weixin does not collect, save, or upload any images from a user’s album without the user’s authorisation.”

Background scanning for new photos “will be cancelled in the new version”, a company representative said. [...]