Taiwan’s Nationwide Safety Bureau (NSB) has warned that China-developed purposes 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 mentioned. “The general public is suggested to train warning when selecting cellular apps.”
The company mentioned 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 line with 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 information, together with facial recognition info, screenshots, clipboard contents, contact lists, and site info. All of the apps have additionally been flagged for harvesting the record of put in apps and system parameters.
“With regard to information transmission and sharing, the mentioned 5 apps had been discovered to ship packets again to servers positioned in China,” the NSB mentioned. “The sort of transmission has raised severe issues over the potential misuse of non-public information by third-parties.”
NSB additionally identified that corporations working in China are obligated to show over person 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 issues. 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 purported to take impact in January 2025 – has been prolonged for a 3rd time.
Final week, one in every 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 person information transfers to China. Related restrictions have additionally been imposed by different nations.
“The NSB strongly advises the general public to stay vigilant concerning cellular system 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.
