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 as a consequence of extreme knowledge assortment and knowledge 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 knowledge assortment and privateness infringement,” the NSB mentioned. “The general public is suggested to train warning when selecting cell apps.”
The company mentioned it evaluated the apps towards 15 indicators spanning 5 broad classes: Private knowledge assortment, extreme permission utilization, knowledge transmission and sharing, system data extraction, and biometric knowledge entry.
In response to the evaluation, RedNote violated all 15 indicators, adopted by Weibo and TikTok that had 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 non-public knowledge, together with facial recognition data, screenshots, clipboard contents, contact lists, and placement data. All of the apps have additionally been flagged for harvesting the record of put in apps and system parameters.
“With regard to knowledge transmission and sharing, the mentioned 5 apps had been discovered to ship packets again to servers positioned in China,” the NSB mentioned. “This sort of transmission has raised critical considerations over the potential misuse of non-public knowledge by third-parties.”
NSB additionally identified that firms working in China are obligated to show over consumer knowledge 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 international locations 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 imagined to take impact in January 2025 – has been prolonged for a 3rd time.
Final week, one in every of Germany’s knowledge safety authorities urged Apple and Google to take away Chinese language synthetic intelligence (AI) chatbot DeepSeek from their respective app shops as a consequence of illegal consumer knowledge transfers to China. Related restrictions have additionally been imposed by different nations.
“The NSB strongly advises the general public to stay vigilant concerning cell system safety and keep away from downloading China-made apps that pose cybersecurity dangers, in order to guard private knowledge privateness and company enterprise secrets and techniques,” it added.