In 2011, Tencent’s Zhang Xiaolong introduced WeChat with a clear goal: it will be the IM for China’s rapidly expanding mobile users. “These functions are aimed at building an ecosystem that captures QQ’s young users.” “We are transforming QQ from a pure messaging app into one that supports chatting, sharing, interest groups, and digital content like games, anime, literature, music, live streaming, and so on,” says (in Chinese) Liu Xiankai, general manager of value-added products at Tencent’s social network group (SNG), one of the tech giant’s seven business groups. Thousands of enthused Chinese youths dressed as their favorite “2D” characters (二次元 in Chinese, nijigen in Japanese), a term referring to manga and anime subculture. Last month, QQ held its third ACG (anime, comic, and games) convention, QQJOY, amid Chengdu’s scorching heat. Instead of engaging in direct competition with WeChat, Tencent’s 18-year-old instant messenger QQ has repositioned itself to be the one-stop entertainment portal for young Chinese, a generation with a propensity for subcultures. QQ, on the other hand, saw a 2% decline to 861 million MAU. Even with the slowing growth, QQ still stands as the country’s second most popular social app, and it wants to make sure it maintains its edge. It wasn’t until Q1 2017 that WeChat, growing at 23% YoY, surpassed QQ for the first time to take the crown with 938 million monthly active users (MAU). For years, QQ had been the biggest social networking app in China.
That Tencent was able to access the web browsing history of millions of individuals in the world – for whatever reason – is plain ol’ scary.WeChat may be the default app for almost every Chinese person, but not long ago its older sibling, QQ, had a similarly formidable position. Most users already know, as an example, that they won’t be able to send a Xinnie the Pooh meme through QQ messenger or WeChat without consequences. For instance, all of these apps come with screening functionality that checks the pictures you’re about to send to make sure that they aren’t offensive – and will stop your recipient from receiving your message if you send it. It’s long been known that instant messaging apps in China, particularly the large ones run by companies like Tencent, need to kowtow to government requests at all times. Furthermore, it became known that this overt lack of encryption was likely explicitly requested by “higher powers.”īesides QQ Messenger, Tencent also owns the most popular instant messaging app in China: WeChat. Back in 2016, the University of Toronto’s CitizenLab revealed that Tencent’s QQ Browser regularly sent personal information back to Tencent unencrypted. Over the years, similar revelations about Tencent’s anti-privacy and weak security practices have come out especially in regards to QQ products. Since last year, QQ messenger has lost 6% of its active users – possibly because users have already started distrusting QQ and Tencent. QQ Messenger would seek out this file and scrape the information, comparing it to a list of keywords and then phoning home if any matches were found.Īfter the spying revelation, Tencent quickly released a new version of QQ Messenger without the web history scraping functionality and claimed that the Chinese company was only previously looking at its millions of users’ web browsing history as a way of ”checking whether malicious programs were using certain websites to access QQ.” This isn’t the first time Tencent has spied on users for the Chinese government Basically, all Chromium based web browsers store your internet history in an sqlite file in local storage.
Here is a Chinese language thread that documents the QQ Messenger web browsing history scraping investigation.
The discovery was made by Chinese internet users on the Q and A platforum Zhihu. QQ Messenger, a popular Chinese instant messaging app by Tencent, was caught scraping web browser history with their desktop client.