New Citizen Lab research reveals how China’s most popular app filters sensitive images and suggests techniques for evasion.

The 19th National Communist Party Congress was held from October 18-24 2017. WeChat, China’s most popular chat app, blocked a broad range of content related to the Congress.

This post recaps Citizen Lab’s major research reports for 2016, which span issues surrounding censorship, surveillance, privacy, and cybersecurity as they relate to fitness trackers, political dissidents, social media users, and more.

This research series presents an in-depth examination of mobile payment systems, a rapidly evolving form of financial technology. We will provide an overview of how they are used in China–where they are taking off faster than anywhere else in the world–and what implications their security and data protection practices may have for millions of users, by presenting a case study on Alipay.

In this report we provide the first systematic study of keyword and website censorship on WeChat, the most popular chat app in China

In this report we analyze Windows and Android versions of web browser UC Browser, and find they transmitted personally identifiable information with easily decryptable encryption and were vulnerable to arbitrary code execution during software updates

This report describes privacy and security issues with the Windows and Android versions of QQ Browser. Our research shows that both versions of the application transmit personally identifiable data without encryption or with easily decrypted encryption, and do not adequately protect the software update process.

A new report from the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab identifies security and privacy issues in QQ Browser, a mobile browser produced by China-based Internet giant Tencent, which may put many millions of users of the application at risk of serious compromise.

This report is an analysis of the types of content removed by WeChat on its public accounts (also known as “official accounts”) blogging platform.