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?
I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it. If I’m going to do that I might as well buy the burner phone once I’m actually in China rather than preemptively get one now. I like her a lot but I’d say we’re at least a year away from going to China together.
The good thing about getting one from the start is that you can set it up to your liking from the get-go and won’t have to do it later. You’ll also get used to using it daily and see how managing two devices works for you.