Tencent's Pony Ma says 2021 WeChat photo privacy controversy was 'misunderstanding' that was fixed with update

Pony Ma Huateng, founder, chairman and CEO of Tencent Holdings, has described a 2021 privacy controversy sparked by a photo issue with its all-purpose super app WeChat as a "misunderstanding", according to a local media report.

Thay year, a tech influencer found that WeChat, China's largest social media app with 1.3 billion monthly active users (MAUs), was frequently accessing user photo galleries even when not in use, which sparked widespread privacy concerns at the time.

Ma described the issue as "a misunderstanding caused by cache acceleration of images", according to a report by Chinese media outlet Yicai on Monday.

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He said the matter was solved by the roll-out of a new application programming interface within the operating system to fix the lag.

Tencent said at the time that the app was looking for new images to make it "faster and smoother for users to send photos", and it only accessed the gallery when authorised by the user. The company also said it would cancel the scanning in a new version of the app.

Yicai picked up Ma's comments from CSDNnews, a tech news outlet run by the Chinese Software Developer Network.

Ma told CSDNnews in a private WeChat message last Friday that this "old incident" in 2021 had been fixed, according to a screenshot shared by the outlet.

Tencent did not immediately respond to a request for comment by the Post on Monday.

China has introduced new laws in recent years that tighten scrutiny over how tech companies handle personal data.

The Data Security Law and the Personal Information Protection Law, some of the world's toughest data protection laws, went into effect in 2021 with strict penalties for the unauthorised collection, processing, storage and use of data generated in the country.

Tencent faced intense scrutiny in 2021 when tech influencer Hackl0us said on social media platform Weibo that the app periodically accessed user photos while running in the background.

The activity was discovered using Apple's "Record App Activity" feature on its iOS 15 operating system at that time.

The influencer also said in 2021 that Tencent's QQ messaging app and Taobao, Alibaba Group Holding's top online shopping marketplace with roughly 900 million MAUs, had also been found routinely accessing user photos. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.

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