If you use Tencent’s QQ web browser your personal data is at risk, experts warn
Major security flaws found as browsers transmit information in a non-secure way due to poor encryption; speculation rife that Chinese sites may have been instructed to do this by higher powers
The popular QQ web browser owned by Tencent, China’s largest internet service portal, has security flaws that could result in the leaking of personal user data, including web and search history, according to a new international study.
QQ, which has hundreds of millions of users, was found by the University of Toronto’s CitizenLab to have significant security issues relating to encryption.
The laboratory, which focuses on advanced research and development of information and communication technologies, said it had previously discovered similar problems in China’s other top browsers, including Baidu and Alibaba’s UC browser.
“Web browsers are trusted to carefully handle sensitive information inputted by users and securely transmit to web servers,” the report said.
“However, QQ browsers and other browsers studied violate this standard of trust by not only collecting sensitive user data themselves, but then also insecurely transmitting it.”
In their report, authors Jeffrey Knockel, Adam Senft and Ron Deibert said that both the Windows and Android versions of the QQ browsers send personal data to servers without proper encryption, leaving it easily available to third-party access.
