Safest way of using WeChat
Safest way of using WeChat
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?
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You can put it in a work profile and trust that Android is protective enough to keep your data safe and access limited. Otherwise buy a second phone just to put WeChat on it. Don't know how WeChat works, but if it's like Whatsapp then you don't need to bother with a secondary number.
To add to this: you can install an open-source app called Shelter which will let you quickly set up a Work Profile for apps you want to keep isolated.
Indeed. Or otherwise Island as an alternative. Don't know how those two compare on the security and privacy front.
It's basically the same, the isolation is done by Android's work profile. Shelter and Island are just frontends for this native Android API.
Indeed. The front ends could be less or more "secure"/private. And by that I mean that I don't know how the app themselves are with access and your data. So I don't know if they collect and share any data and how reliable the developers are.
Both are open-source and there's a fork of Island on F-Droid called Insular. These shouldn't collect any data, in fact, they can't include any proprietary tracking SDKs because these aren't allowed on F-Droid.
If you own a Samsung phone, I'd also recommend their Secure Folder, which is apparently pretty damn secure and isolated from the rest of the device.