I live in Canada. My girlfriend is Chinese (also living in Canada), and while we are able to communicate via SMS, her mobile carrier isn’t the best, and so there have often been issues for us with regular texting. She expressed a strong preference to use WeChat, at least as a backup option for when texting fails us. While I have some pretty significant reservations, it’s not the hill I want to die on. So my question is: what can be done to use WeChat without compromising my whole phone? I’m okay with it if our conversations aren’t private, but I’d like to know that I’m not giving unfettered access to all of my phone’s systems and data to the CCP. What can be done to limit the reach of this ubiquitous app on my device?
Yeah she’s an iPhone user. And she wants to use WeChat because it’s like second nature to Chinese people. It’s as normal to them as email is to us in the west. They are totally desensitized to the digital privacy concerns.
She has WhatsApp as well, but it’s not set up properly on her phone so she doesn’t get notifications for it. Plus I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t work if she traveled back to China.