Tag: messaging

WeChat Pay Partners up with Japan’s Line

Asia, ChinaNo Comments

WeChat, China’s hugely popular messaging and social media app, has announced plans to integrate with LINE, a similar app based in Japan. The partnership will unilaterally allow WeChat users to pay for goods and services over the Line platform.

WeChat

Tencent, a Chinese multinational holding conglomerate, released WeChat in 2011.  (Tencent has garnered a whopping zero out of 100 score from Amnesty International’s report on companies’ use of encryption to protect user data.)

WeChat Pay was introduced during the 2014 Lunar New Year, allowing users to send digital hongbao packets to friends and family. Users sent 20 million packets that year. In 2016, over 3 billion were sent.

The service has been wholeheartedly integrated into Chinese life. An estimated 900 million different accounts use WeChat Pay every month for private transfers, online goods and services shopping, and bill payments. Its messaging services have mostly replaced email for personal and business communications, the payment system largely renders credit cards obsolete, and its social media feeds and user “Moments” are one of China’s most popularly used media sharing platforms. It offers a stuffed animal, MonMon, for small children to send and receive WeChat voice messages from their parents. WeChat Pay can link to bank accounts in China, Hong Kong, Malaysia, and South Africa.

Line

Line was released in 2011 after an earthquake and tsunami disrupted telecommunications across Japan. Within two years 300 million users had installed the text, voice, and video communication app. Today almost half of the Japanese population, an estimated 78 million, uses Line. It is also one of the most popular messaging apps in Japan, Taiwan, Thailand, and Indonesia, with an estimated 164 million active users in those four countries. As of 2016, it had released over 320,000 sets of stickers. 

Line introduced Line Pay in December 2014. Like WeChat Pay, it facilitates user to user as well as user to merchant payments. In 2016, it released a free card that could be used for in-store purchases. It also allows the use of Line Taxi, a popular ride-hailing service in Japan.

One app, two countries

The cooperation between the two is intended to simplify payments for Chinese tourists or visitors in Japan. WeChat users will be able to buy goods and services in Japan without exchanging cash, or setting up a Line Pay account of their own. Line, which offers end to end encryption, is banned by the Chinese government.

The end of end-to-end encrypted messaging?

General

Messaging and social media platforms have long been denounced by politicians as channels through which criminals could be either retroactively convicted of their misdoings, or identified before a crime can actually be committed. These potential crimes are usually described in terroristic terms, and any platform that does not make itself available to government access is denounced as an opponent of security, or even an enabler of terrorism.

US Attorney General William Barr, who has recently tightened regulations on family-based asylum seekers and reinstated the death penalty as a federal sentence—explicitly naming five current inmates to be processed into an execution—spoke in July again about the dangers of encrypted messaging. Barr’s warnings and demands reiterated those made in 2016 that Apple instate a back-door to mobile devices that would provide law enforcement access. 

Facebook and WhatsApp moving towards concession

Although these demands are not universally agreed upon by other US public servants, Facebook has continued its trend of opening up its data troves to governments (and advertisers) by proposing a bypassed encryption process, in which the messaging platform software includes built-in content moderation and blacklist filtering. Running on each individual’s device, it would give unencrypted access to the content of each message – any claims of encryption would actually just mean the platform company holds sole control over the unencrypted content.

WhatsApp, bought by Facebook in 2014, with a reputation as a secure, end-to-end encrypted client, is hugely undermined by Facebook’s emerging position on this device-based approach to content monitoring. The notion that this accessible mass of personal data would only be used in the interest of national security seems unlikely, as there is a huge incentive for third parties to hack into it, and for the host to monetize it. 

Alternative messaging apps

With WhatsApp seemingly (or imminently) compromised, other major viable end-to-end encrypted clients are currently: Viber, which instated end-to-end in 2016; Line, in 2011; and Signal, which was designed to be so from the start.