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?
Phone apps are already fairly sandboxed.
Use your phone’s permission system, look at the app’s permissions, and set them as strict as the app will allow you to while continuing to function. I don’t see any particularly scary permissions that aren’t optional (looking in Google Play/the Android permissions set).
Pretty much anything beyond that you’re wasting your time unless you want to carry two phones.
Edit: I see you went with Shelter; hadn’t heard of that either. Probably overkill, but as long as it doesn’t cause problems/the app works for you, go for it.
Well it means that if I do grant a permission to the app like for example file storage access to send my gf a funny meme I downloaded, it doesn’t get access to all of the pictures and files on my device.
Not sure how wechat works. I vaguely recall being able to restrict apps to pick photos only through the gallery app on recent versions of Android.
It doesn’t seem to use that interface weirdly. It just asks for file storage permission and then has its own explorer to select files.
Ah, then yeah probably best to do what you’re doing … it may very well scan for things or do who knows what.
Yeah exactly. I’ve had to take photos of various ID documents at different points for various reasons and so there are things like photos of my driver’s license stored in my phone’s filesystem. I’m glad Shelter gives a bit of insulation there. It lets me copy files in and out of the sandbox, but by default the sandbox has no files in it.
I’d recommend deleting those when you get the chance … no real reason to tempt fate regardless of what apps are on your phone 😉