01/19/2022
This year marks China’s turn to once again host the Olympics in Beijing. And this time, there’s more to expect than what was there before. Not only is COVID a huge factor to work against, but now China is implementing an app for all international visitors to install before visiting.
The app is called “My 2022,” which is being used to monitor the health of the user for 14 days prior to their departure from China. It seems like a reasonable app to make although it holds personal information, it IS being done with the idea of containing the virus. But Citizen Lab was still suspicious about how this could go.
It seems that their suspicions were right in some ways. They found some vulnerabilities that can be easy for any good hacker to steal anyone’s sensitive information. But not only that, they found something that is common in China but through this app: censorship. Well, it’s not ENTIRELY in the app, but according to Citizen Lab, they found a list of keywords that they deem offensive to the country. It’s unknown whether if the keywords were inactive intentionally or inactive entirely.
From what they could get, the censorship features were removed, perhaps to not get a negative reputation from what they already have, and they did reach back to Citizen Lab about the vulnerabilities. The article was not clear as to what happened with that.
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Visitors have to install it 14 days prior to arrival in China until their departure