En China, privacy is not taken as seriously as in almost any other country. And not only that of those who are born and live there, but also the privacy of Tourists. The Guardian, in an investigation with the New York Times and Vice -among others- have discovered that the country's border agents have been installing spyware on the mobiles of some of its tourists. A spyware in the form of an application to find 'dangerous content' on mobiles.
At the border crossing, agents ask travelers to hand over their smartphones and ask for the password of unlocking it. It is at this time, during more than an hour of waiting, when the application is installed on both Android devices and iPhone by connecting the device to a computer. What is done with this computer is install the application 'Fēng cǎi' which should actually be uninstalled as soon as the device is returned to its owner. But they haven't been uninstalling it in any case.
China has installed this app on the mobile of its tourists to spy on what they do and review all its contents
The application should automatically scan the device, looking for 73.000 contents different that are cataloged as 'dangerous' and, when the device is handed over to its owner, it should no longer exist in the device's memory. When installed, the application continues to have access to contacts, call history, calendar events, the entire list of applications, messages exchanged with other users, and so on. And all this information it goes up to a server.
A priori, it should be used to locate content related to weapons, with Islamist extremism and others. What are cataloged as 'dangerous' by the Chinese government. But the app, which stays installed even when it shouldn't, has access to much more information. In addition, although it is known that the information obtained from smartphones is stored on a server, the exact destination that it has is unknown.
The practices in China, many of them excused with the country security, go beyond the privacy of users. And in this case, while it is true that the automatic scanning of the device could be to some extent understandable, the spyware It has been around for much longer than it should be installed on tourists' devices. At the moment, there has been no official communication from China regarding the investigation.