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Limiting WeChat will have major effects on the Chinese diaspora in the US, but Tencent has long been accused of censoring and surveilling overseas users, essentially extending the Great Firewall beyond China, and setting the stage for this type of action: https://citizenlab.ca/2020/05/we-chat-they-watch/
If big tech was actually regulated, and both Chinese and US firms weren't given practically free reign for years, this behaviour might have been stopped a long time ago, and standards could have been set for how Chinese services operated in the US.
This move sucks for Chinese diaspora & other US users of WeChat, but Tencent is not some innocent party in this. Nor would it be so far reaching had Chinese censorship and protectionism not created a situation where WeChat is basically the only messaging app most people can use.
In my book, I reported on how WeChat has affected the Tibetan diaspora community and potentially enabled greater surveillance and control of their communications with relatives back in China:
(This is more of a personal preference, but hey if Tencent hadn't stuffed every single service into one bloated app, maybe it would be easier to unpick them all now.)
In a perfect world of course, this wouldn't be a conversation about just Chinese companies, it would be how a whole ecosystem of privacy abusing big tech firms have obscene amounts of control over data online, and how that is a threat to users regarldess of their ownership.
"Arguments for a national ban against dishonest tech companies that harvest as much data as possible and backchannel with spy agencies and police hold up pretty well no matter which company is slotted into the national security mad libs." https://theintercept.com/2020/08/06/the-filthy-hypocrisy-of-americas-clean-china-free-internet/
TikTok elucidates this point well, because in theory, it should have barely any data on users, beyond what people hand over at registration, and their videos. That it is apparently hoovering up much more if because of an industry-wide standard that is long due for regulation.
Why is a video app allowed to scrape all this data, regardless of ownership. ByteDance is never going to convince people that, when push comes to shove, it could resist handing data over to Beijing, but if it never collected so much in the first place... https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-07-14/tiktok-s-massive-data-harvesting-prompts-u-s-security-concerns
Masterclass in the pot calling the kettle black from Beijing in response to Trump's TikTok ban.
