WeChat responds to reading user photo albums: This function will no longer be used

Earlier today, some netizens revealed that WeChat was repeatedly reading users' photo albums in the background.

The netizen turned on iOS 15’s new privacy feature “Record App Activity” to monitor the privacy reading behavior of all apps for 7 days and use App Privacy Insights to read the records.

Monitoring found that WeChat read users' photo albums several times in the background without the users actively activating the App, and each reading took up to 1 minute.

In response to this incident, WeChat said: The iOS system provides App developers with standard capabilities for album update notifications. When the album content is updated, the App will be notified to remind the App to prepare in advance. The App's preparation behavior will be recorded as reading the system album.

When the user authorizes WeChat to read the "system album permissions", in order to facilitate the user to quickly send pictures when pressing "+" in WeChat chat, WeChat uses this system capability to make the user's picture sending experience faster and smoother.

WeChat stressed that the above actions were only completed locally on the phone. " In the latest version, we will cancel the use of this system capability and optimize the quick picture posting function. "