For many people in China, their first experience of the internet has been through mobile devices. The Chinese experience of the internet is somewhat different from those of other countries. With WeChat, people are no longer tied to the phone number of a single device instead, they have a consistent online identity across multiple devices. What started as a chat app is now the lens through which 889 million Chinese people experience the internet. WeChat would go on to integrate mobile payments, ride-share bookings, Slack-like business chat, QR code-based replacements for business cards, and more. Today there are around 10 million such accounts. A year later, it allowed companies to register brand accounts. TenCent, the huge Chinese gaming and social media company, launched WeChat in 2011 as a straightforward chat app. Watching how WeChat has developed in China, it’s perhaps more useful to think of chat platforms as the gatekeepers to people’s online identities.
It’s a mistake to think of WhatsApp and SMS as precise equivalents. Which raises a pretty fundamental question: if you can reach all my customers via SMS, what does WhatsApp mean for how you engage customers? Could WhatsApp Be the WeChat of Countries Outside China? When you request information, the process is reversed.Essentially, WhatsApp is allowing businesses to communicate with customers in all the same ways they currently do with SMS. There, it is decrypted, given an IP address from said country, and sent on to the website you are attempting to access. Information sent by you to the Internet is encrypted and sent through the “tunnel” to the remote computer. A VPN works by creating secure “tunnel” between your computer and one located in a different country located outside of the censorship zone. A VPN works much like a proxy with the difference being that a VPN encrypts the information that you send and receive, while a proxy does not. The primary way is by using a Virtual Private Network (VPN).
#Wechat vs whatsapp how to#
How to Safely Access Whatsapp as a Tourist in ChinaĪlthough the four aforementioned WhatsApp alternatives all have strengths and cool features, if you are visiting China and want to access your Whatsapp account, there are ways you can still do this. Threema has support for texts, voice messages, and sharing videos and photos. The encryption comes for the NaCL cryptography library and the encryption keys are stored on each device, effectively eliminating backdoor hacking. It is heavy on security to keep out hackers with end-to-end encryption of all media files, group chats, and messages sent and received. The Swiss are known for a lot of cool innovations, and Threema keeps that trend going. In a report by Amnesty International, Tencent got the lowest score among 11 popular messenger apps concerning how it used encryption for user privacy. Tencent denied this claim, although its privacy policy says it may need to retain and disclose users’ information if asked to do so by the government or law enforcement. The company has also been accused of storing user chats. A study found that is users register with a Chinese phone number, the app continues to censor their content, even if they travel overseas or switch to a phone number from a foreign country.
The country’s censorship seems imbedded in the app at every turn, however. It’s so popular that WeChat’s parent company, Tencent, surpassed Facebook in market value last year and became the first Asian company to break $500 billion. WeChat is the closest thing to Google in China, combining messaging, social media, games, news, payment services, and more.
WeChat is the Chinese equivalent to WhatsApp and crossed 1 billion users in May 2017, a surprising number of them coming from outside of China’s borders.
0 kommentar(er)
