A claim by one of the Communist Party’s anti-graft watchdogs that it retrieved deleted messages from a suspect’s WeChat account has fuelled privacy concerns in China.

But Tencent, the operator of the country’s most popular instant messaging app, denied on Sunday that it was storing users’ chat histories.

“WeChat does not store any chat histories – they are only stored on users’ phones and computers,” Tencent said on its official social media account.

“WeChat does not use any chat histories for big data analysis,” it added.

Tencent’s statement came a day after the party graft-buster in southeastern Hefei, Anhui province announced in a social media post that the branch in a neighbouring city had obtained deleted chats from a suspect.

“The Chaohu Municipal Discipline Inspection and Supervision Commission in March retrieved a series of deleted WeChat conversations from a suspect,” the post said.

The watchdog then began investigating the case and questioned a number of suspects based on the chat histories, according to the post.

It claimed many of those questioned had confessed to discipline violations.

“From January to April, the commission punished 63 cadres,” it said.

The post was widely circulated on the mainland on Saturday, but by Sunday it had been deleted.

It was a highly unusual admission from the Chinese authorities that it is technically possible to recover someone’s chat history from the messaging app, which has nearly one billion users worldwide.

The claim had many Chinese talking about privacy on social media.

Source: scmp

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