Chinese border guards install spyware on tourists' smartphones (3 photos)

It is difficult for modern man to stay inalone Electronic gadgets provide many opportunities for tracking, as the user's location, and received and transmitted information. Special tracking applications often help in the search for children, but this function is also used by both criminals and government agencies designed to monitor the privacy of citizens. And this is not paranoia; tourists who have visited the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region of China have learned this from their own experience.

Northwest Travelersthe province of China was surprised to find that unknown BXAQ or Fēng cai applications appeared in their smartphones, to the installation of which they had nothing to do. It turned out that Chinese intelligence officers install software on their own during customs inspection, demanding the device in an unlocked form and without obtaining the prior consent of the owners of smartphones to install programs.

Applications get all the available information fromsmartphone, including contacts, call history and correspondence, notes from the calendar and notebooks, e-mail, a list of active contacts in messengers and social networks, photos and texts (for example, excerpts from the Koran, documents with separatist bias, etc.) All information obtained by the spy application is transmitted to the server of the special services of China.

Most likely, such actions of special services will beexplain anti-terrorism activities. In connection with the exacerbation of the situation in the bordering district of Pakistan and India, the Chinese authorities are taking extraordinary measures that, in principle, violate the right of tourists to privacy. Most likely, after analysis at the border, the applications must be removed by the border guards themselves, but they sometimes forget to do this. Such a mistake was the reason for the publicity of the actions of the Chinese authorities. The media have suggested that such programs are forcibly installed on smartphones of Muslims who live primarily in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region to spy on them.

Source: nytimes.com, theguardian.com