Chinese apps and the threat to privacy

At a time when people across the world are working from home, China has blocked Zoom, leaving the market wide open for local players.

For representational purposes.

The success of the Swadeshi movement during the Independence struggle was not the outcome of Indians boycotting Western goods. It was because India had a strong symbol of resistance—the charkha. Today, in this perception battle against China, we lack such a symbol. Even as one section of Indians is making frantic calls to boycott Chinese apps and a second group is dissing it as an impractical move, Beijing has quietly set the wheels rolling to dethrone Zoom as the most-preferred video conferencing app.

At a time when people across the world are working from home, China has blocked Zoom, leaving the market wide open for local players. Now, video conferences in China happen mostly over VooV, backed by a company called Tencent. It is a mistake to think Chinese apps are targeting India alone. Like any other aggressive business, their target is the global market. An analysis by RiskIQ earlier this year says there are close to nine million mobile apps on the planet, and a whopping 40% of app spending came from China. Neither Google Play nor the Apple Store is among the top three app stores in the world.

The top three are hardly known outside China—ApkGK, APKpure Co and AndroidAppsApk. It’s not like the Chinese are using these out of free will. Through a series of blockades on international players, their government has left them no option but to use local apps. This March, thanks to a Dutch hacker, it came to light that conversations of Chinese people using Tencent applications from internet cafes were being relayed live to local police stations. Days later, Tencent’s founder Pony Ma entered China’s rubber-stamp parliament, the National People’s Congress.

Tencent has invested in 800 firms globally, of which just 15 are in India, including Swiggy and Flipkart. While the informed public is sensitive about data privacy when it comes to local government and global internet corporations, it has largely remained unconcerned about China. If India is to overcome this threat to privacy, it needs a ‘digital charkha’ that, unlike the Chinese and global corporations, is transparent about its data collection and usage policies.