DragonI

Dangerous liaisons

We took the most popular dating apps and analyzed what sort of user data they were capable of handing over to criminals and under what conditions.

securelist.com|Sidney Fussell

It seems just about everyone has written about the dangers of online dating, from psychology magazines to crime chronicles. But there is one less obvious threat not related to hooking up with strangers – and that is the mobile apps used to facilitate the process. We’re talking here about intercepting and stealing personal information and the de-anonymization of a dating service that could cause victims no end of troubles – from messages being sent out in their names to blackmail.

We studied the following online dating applications:

• Tinder for Android and iOS
• Bumble for Android and iOS
• OK Cupid for Android and iOS
• Badoo for Android and iOS
• Mamba for Android and iOS
• Zoosk for Android and iOS
• Happn for Android and iOS
• WeChat for Android and iOS
• Paktor for Android and iOS

By de-anonymization we mean the user’s real name being established from a social media network profile where use of an alias is meaningless

Location — determining user location (“+” – possible, “-” not possible)

Stalking — finding the full name of the user, as well as their accounts in other social networks, the percentage of detected users (percentage indicates the number of successful identifications)

HTTP — the ability to intercept any data from the application sent in an unencrypted form (“NO” – could not find the data, “Low” – non-dangerous data, “Medium” – data that can be dangerous, “High” – intercepted data that can be used to get account management).

HTTPS — interception of data transmitted inside the encrypted connection (“+” – possible, “-” not possible).

Messages — access to user messages by using root rights (“+” – possible, “-” not possible).

TOKEN — possibility to steal authentication token by using root rights (“+” – possible, “-” not possible).

China Makes Chat Group Administrators — i.e. Regular Users — Criminally Liable for Unlawful Messages · Global Voices

Chat group administrators are becoming a key human resource in China's internet control infrastructure.

globalvoices.org

New regulations in China will make chat group administrators responsible — and even criminally liable — for messages containing politically sensitive material, rumors and violent or pornographic content.

The regulations also demand that all chat room users in mainland China verify their real identity.

Dovetailing with China's new regulation on the management of online comments, the news rules will also force chat service companies (such as WeChat and QQ) to punish users who have not verified their identities or who have violated other terms of use, such as posting scams, rumors or politically sensitive material. Users who violate these rules will have certain account privileges suspended, and have their social credit scores lowered.

The regulations also require that the companies record, monitor and retain users’ chat records for at least six months and notify authorities whenever they spot abusive use of group chats.

On China’s Bleeding Edge: Web Design Trends 2015

www.smashingmagazine.com

In this article, Kendra Schaefer examines the things all web professionals should know before swan-diving into the Chinese market, including how mobile-only social platforms have become the revolutionary new frontier of Chinese web design, and who’s designing beautiful websites in China today.

“So, how do you feel China’s coming along in terms of supporting responsive design?”

Saber shrugs at me, like I asked the wrong question. “There aren’t a lot of responsive websites in China, as most clients prefer separate websites for different devices. In terms of responsive, we don’t really relate to the web in that way; we don’t think of the desktop website as a mothership, or even as a scaled-up version of a more streamlined mobile website. Actually, a significant number of Chinese companies are bypassing the desktop experience entirely.”

Chinese users accessing the internet via mobile grew to 83.4 percent as of June 2014, for the first time surpassing the percentage of users who access the internet via PCs (80.9 percent).

Websites are so 2010. In 2015, Chinese companies are building light apps, orqing ying yong (轻应用). Light apps are one-off, zero-download, hyper-targeted mini-sites that are typically built (and often animated) with HTML5. Oh sure, they do have a dedicated URL and they’ll load in a desktop browser if you absolutely insist, but they’ll probably look awful on a desktop screen. In some cases, they don’t even function at all after the page loads, given that some of them require swipes to navigate.

Light apps are designed for fruit-fly attention spans. They’re often single-page, single-message and intended to be single-use. In other words, users would open a light app once, flip through it, ideally pass it on to friends via mobile sharing, and then never look at it again.

Companies are happy to build experiences that operate exclusively in WeChat, because they get so much more data on their users than they do from standard mobile websites. When a user accesses your website via their WeChat browser, you see their WeChat ID, and if they follow you on WeChat, you get to see seven points of data about them: WeChat ID, nickname, profile picture, location (city), primary WeChat language, gender and date when they started following the account. This enables companies to tightly target their marketing right out of the gate, especially in terms of the gender and geographic variables. On top of that, “WeChat Sign-Up” enables HTML5 game developers to customize the experience for users, with their nickname and profile picture.