In this paper, researchers examine the analytics and first-party tracking ecosystem of WeChat Mini Programs. They find that WeChat is comprehensively tracking user activity at an unprecedented scale with no way for users nor developers to opt out.
Co-authored by Mona Wang (Princeton University / The Citizen Lab), Pellaeon Lin (The Citizen Lab), Jeffrey Knockel (The Citizen Lab / Bowdoin College), Will Greenberg (Electronic Frontier Foundation), Jonathan Mayer (Princeton University), Prateek Mittal (Princeton University)
Read What WeChat Knows: Pervasive First-Party Tracking in a Billion-User Super-App Ecosystem in the Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS) 2025 conference proceedings.