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from the 1984-was-not-supposed-to-be-an-instruction-manual dept.
http://mashable.com/2017/07/21/china-spyware-xinjiang/
China has ramped up surveillance measures in Xinjiang, home to much of its Muslim minority population, according to reports from Radio Free Asia.
Authorities sent out a notice over a week ago instructing citizens to install a "surveillance app" on their phones, and are conducting spot checks in the region to ensure that residents have it.
— Delinda Tien (@TienDelinda) July 14, 2017
The notice, written in Uyghur and Chinese, was sent by WeChat to residents in Urumqi, Xinjiang's capital.
Android users were instructed to scan the QR code in order to install the Jingwang app that would, as authorities claimed, "automatically detect terrorist and illegal religious videos, images, e-books and electronic documents" stored in the phone. If illegal content was detected, users would be ordered to delete them.
Users who deleted, or did not install the app, would be detained for up to 10 days, according to social media users.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 06 2017, @11:46PM
That's a good question. As for Apple, I doubt they would be able to get their app into Apple's walled garden. But on the other hand, all the government needs to do is ask and Apple will hand over their iCloud backups, so they are likely even more owned than the Android users. For Microsoft, who knows? Do they even have a significant number of users in China?
Dumb phone users are already owned, in the sense that all their communications (calls and texts) are already tracked and logged so there really isn't anything of interest on a dumb phone that they wouldn't know already. They are obviously worried about smart phones which can access the internet and send and receive encrypted communications.
I suppose you could lie and say you don't have a phone, but if they catch you then it probably isn't going to be pretty.