China forces Muslims to install spyware on their phones

The Chinese government is forcing some ethnic minorities to install a smartphone app that would help monitor their activities, those who do not install this spyware on their phone could be detained for up to 10 days.

It is a spyware to monitor all phone activity

The initiative started in the city of Xinjiang in western China. Authorities are sending messages via WeChat to residents forcing them to install an Android application called Jingwang whose role is to spy on users and detect potential terrorist threats, monitoring all user activity on the Internet and in documents that are housed on the phone.

Most of the people living in that region of China are Muslims and the authorities fear that terrorist cells are housed there. The message is spreading in both Mandarin and Uighur, the latter being the language spoken by the Uighur ethnic group, whose population is 8 million.

The message also includes a QR code with which the application is downloaded, along with a warning that those who do not install the application will be imprisoned for a maximum of 10 days. Police warn that random checks will be carried out in the coming weeks to ensure that everyone installs the app and that offending content is not stored on mobile devices.

The message in question and its QR code

Wi-Fi access data, IMEI device data, and SIM card data are collected and transferred to a government server, along with information about media files stored on the device and compared to digital signatures of marked content as an offender or linked to terrorist activity.

At the moment this spy application is only available on Android, but it is believed that it will also be added for iPhone soon.

Source: softpedia