Recently WeChat made a very important upgrade, Tencent did not as much as in the past to publicize the outside world, WeChat this upgrade is about the protection of personal information, of which we are most concerned about the personalized advertising recommendation of the closing entrance.
Before the WeChat version of the personalized advertising recommendation to close the entrance is extremely hidden, the shutdown process is cumbersome to set, and almost no one knows how to close it.
What we know is that the price of precision advertising must be much higher than that of non-precision advertising, and Tencent's revenue due to precision advertising is very considerable.
Precision advertising undoubtedly uses a lot of consumer personal information, according to Tencent, it may be the use of behavioral data.
What is usage behavior data?
For example, whose circle of friends have you seen? Who did you like? What articles did you read? What was searched? Who to contact regularly and so on
These are undoubtedly information that consumers find very private.
We have also asked many consumers, they basically have no concept of personalized advertising, and feel that it is similar to advertising. But when they know that behind receiving personalized advertising recommendations is that Tencent wants to get so much of their behavioral data in WeChat, and will collect so much personal information, consumers will mostly not be willing, if given the right to choose, they will also choose to turn off personalized advertising recommendations.
From September 2019 to November 2020, we spent 15 months testing 1600 software, the most prominent of which is the lengthy and complex Rules of the WeChat APP Privacy Policy, the extremely hidden entrance to personalized advertising recommendation, the cumbersome setting of the closing process, and the use of technical means to restrict consumers' right to permanently close personalized advertising recommendations, consumers can only close for a period of six months and still see ads.
We interviewed Tencent.
In the new version of WeChat, I - settings - privacy - personal information and permissions - personalized wide. It only takes 5 steps to completely turn off WeChat personalized advertising recommendations.
(In previous versions, closing the entrance was very discreet and required 11 steps to close)
Personalized ad recommendations are turned off, and while ads will still be available, your personal information will be much safer.
We affirm Tencent's improvements, but we have one more question to ask, and this question is also relevant to every WeChat user:
In the "Understanding the Working Principle of WeChat Personalized Advertising", it is mentioned that "in the process of advertising, WeChat advertising may speculate on content that you may be interested in based on information such as behavioral data generated when you register for Tencent's services." ”
We would like to ask, if consumers turn off personalized advertising recommendations, will Tencent no longer collect consumer behavior data or will it still collect but not use it?
If Tencent is still collecting consumer behavior data, what is the reason for that?
Article 6 of the Personal Information Protection Law stipulates that the handling of personal information shall have a clear and reasonable purpose, and shall be directly related to the purpose of processing, and adopt the method that has the least impact on the rights and interests of individuals. The collection of personal information shall be limited to the minimum scope for the purpose of processing, and personal information must not be collected excessively.
Tencent's privacy policy says, "Subject to compliance with relevant laws and regulations, we may use the information collected through certain services for our other services." ”
What are some of these services? What information is collected? What are the other services?