Recently a user on the V2EX forum reported that their security software caught the PC version of WeChat scanning browser history, and that browser cookies were involved. They included a screen recording catching it in the act.
Here’s the user’s screenshot:
And the user’s video:
In response, an account claiming to be a Tencent engineer replied:
Hello Suningyo, I’m a Tencent engineer. Let me state up front that WeChat absolutely does not proactively violate user privacy.
Over the weekend we tried the path you provided many times and could not reproduce the issue. The developers responsible for this logic also reviewed the code and found no such functionality in the browser engine.
Our initial suspicion is that it’s related to your environment or to a vulnerability in the browser engine (chromium 53). If convenient, get in touch so we can pin down the actual cause. Many thanks.
You can reach us through the PC WeChat feedback QQ group listed on the official PC WeChat site at https://pc.weixin.qq.com/ . Thanks again.
Not long before this, Tencent’s QQ client was also reported to be “scanning and reading users’ browser history”. Tencent’s official QQ response said that PC QQ does read browser history to assess login security risk, and that the data is used within the PC QQ client to determine whether a login is malicious.
