The Information Controls Fellowship Program from the Open Technology Fund (OTF) supports research into how governments in countries, regions, or areas of OTF’s core focus are restricting the free flow of information, cutting access to the open Internet, and implementing censorship mechanisms, thereby threatening the ability of global citizens to exercise basic human rights and democracy; work focused on mitigation of such threats is also supported.

MY2022, an app mandated for use by all attendees of the 2022 Olympic Games in Beijing, has a simple but devastating flaw where encryption protecting users’ voice audio and file transfers can be trivially sidestepped. Health customs forms which transmit passport details, demographic information, and medical and travel history are also vulnerable. Server responses can also be spoofed, allowing an attacker to display fake instructions to users.

Within mainland China, we found that Apple censors political content including broad references to Chinese leadership and China’s political system, names of dissidents and independent news organizations, and general terms relating to religions, democracy, and human rights. And across all six regions, we found that Apple’s content moderation practices pertaining to derogatory, racist, or sexual content are inconsistently applied and that Apple’s public-facing documents failed to explain how it derives their keyword lists.

Given our experiences, we have specific recommendations for how any federal commercial privacy legislation must be amended to better protect individuals from the predations and power of private organizations. In making our recommendations we have chosen to focus almost exclusively on the Openness and Transparency, Access to and Amendment of Personal Information, and Whistleblower sections of Bill C-11.

2021 年 3 月 22 日，公民實驗室發佈了一篇研究報告，比較 TikTok 與抖音的安全、隱私及言論審查。我們將於本文中與研究員 Pellaeon Lin 討論他的研究發現。

On March 22, 2021, Citizen Lab research associate Christopher Parsons appeared before the Special Committee on Canada-China Relations to testify about issues of national security, governance, and trust with regards to Chinese companies and their technical products and services.

In this explainer, we discuss the findings of our comparative analysis of security, privacy, and censorship issues in TikTok and Douyin.

A comparative analysis of security, privacy, and censorship issues in TikTok and Douyin, both developed by ByteDance.

As a follow-up to our March 2020 report, we conducted daily tests on WeChat and collected 2,174 censored keywords between January to May 2020. This data provides a view into how narratives and messaging on the pandemic are controlled and molded on social media in China.

公民实验室2020年5月7日发布报告指出，中国最流行的社交媒体软件微信是对平台上的文档和图像内容实施监控，并使用监控所得的数据训练其审查系统。本文是对该报告的概述，以及与研究团队的一些常见问答。