Saturday, July 5, 2025

Taiwan NSB Alerts Public on Information Dangers from TikTok, Weibo, and RedNote Over China Ties

Jul 05, 2025Ravie LakshmananNationwide Safety / Privateness

Taiwan NSB Alerts Public on Information Dangers from TikTok, Weibo, and RedNote Over China Ties

Taiwan’s Nationwide Safety Bureau (NSB) has warned that China-developed functions like RedNote (aka Xiaohongshu), Weibo, TikTok, WeChat, and Baidu Cloud pose safety dangers on account of extreme knowledge assortment and knowledge 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 Felony Investigation Bureau (CIB) below the Nationwide Police Company.

“The outcomes point out the existence of safety points, together with extreme knowledge assortment and privateness infringement,” the NSB mentioned. “The general public is suggested to train warning when selecting cellular apps.”

Cybersecurity

The company mentioned it evaluated the apps in opposition to 15 indicators spanning 5 broad classes: Private knowledge assortment, extreme permission utilization, knowledge transmission and sharing, system info extraction, and biometric knowledge entry.

In keeping 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 private knowledge, 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 gadget parameters.

“With regard to knowledge transmission and sharing, the mentioned 5 apps had been discovered to ship packets again to servers positioned in China,” the NSB mentioned. “This sort of transmission has raised severe issues over the potential misuse of private knowledge by third-parties.”

NSB additionally identified that firms working in China are obligated to show over person knowledge below 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 international locations like India have enacted bans in opposition to 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 speculated to take impact in January 2025 – has been prolonged for a 3rd time.

Cybersecurity

Final week, one in all Germany’s knowledge safety authorities urged Apple and Google to take away Chinese language synthetic intelligence (AI) chatbot DeepSeek from their respective app shops on account of illegal person knowledge transfers to China. Related restrictions have additionally been imposed by different nations.

“The NSB strongly advises the general public to stay vigilant concerning cellular gadget safety and keep away from downloading China-made apps that pose cybersecurity dangers, in order to guard private knowledge privateness and company enterprise secrets and techniques,” it added.

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