Taiwan’s Nationwide Safety Bureau (NSB) has warned that China-developed functions like RedNote (aka Xiaohongshu), Weibo, TikTok, WeChat, and Baidu Cloud pose safety dangers resulting from extreme information assortment and information switch to China.
The alert comes following an inspection of those apps carried out in coordination with the Ministry of Justice Investigation Bureau (MJIB) and the Legal Investigation Bureau (CIB) underneath the Nationwide Police Company.
“The outcomes point out the existence of safety points, together with extreme information assortment and privateness infringement,” the NSB stated. “The general public is suggested to train warning when selecting cellular apps.”
The company stated it evaluated the apps towards 15 indicators spanning 5 broad classes: Private information assortment, extreme permission utilization, information transmission and sharing, system info extraction, and biometric information entry.
In response to the evaluation, RedNote violated all 15 indicators, adopted by Weibo and TikTok that have been discovered to breach 13 indicators. WeChat and Baidu Cloud violated 10 and 9 of the 15 indicators, respectively.
These points encompassed intensive assortment of private information, together with facial recognition info, screenshots, clipboard contents, contact lists, and placement info. All of the apps have additionally been flagged for harvesting the checklist of put in apps and gadget parameters.
“With regard to information transmission and sharing, the stated 5 apps have been discovered to ship packets again to servers situated in China,” the NSB stated. “This kind of transmission has raised severe considerations over the potential misuse of private information by third-parties.”
NSB additionally identified that firms working in China are obligated to show over consumer information underneath home legal guidelines for nationwide safety, public safety, and intelligence functions, and that utilizing these apps can breach the privateness of Taiwanese customers.
The event comes as nations like India have enacted bans towards Chinese language-made apps, citing safety considerations. In November 2024, Canada ordered TikTok to dissolve its operations within the nation, though its destiny within the U.S. nonetheless stays in limbo, because the ban – which was presupposed to take impact in January 2025 – has been prolonged for a 3rd time.
Final week, certainly one of Germany’s information safety authorities urged Apple and Google to take away Chinese language synthetic intelligence (AI) chatbot DeepSeek from their respective app shops resulting from illegal consumer information transfers to China. Comparable restrictions have additionally been imposed by different nations.
“The NSB strongly advises the general public to stay vigilant concerning cellular gadget safety and keep away from downloading China-made apps that pose cybersecurity dangers, in order to guard private information privateness and company enterprise secrets and techniques,” it added.
