Tencent says it will comply with law enforcement requests on user data
Shenzhen-based Tencent, Asia’s most valuable company by market cap, doubles quarterly profit on strong smartphone games business
Tencent Holdings will comply with law enforcement requests on user data, the company’s senior management said, amid the growing scrutiny and debate on the role that social networks like Facebook should play in protecting customer information.
“We are very concerned about user data security. It is top of our concerns,” Tencent president Martin Lau Chi-ping said at a press conference on Wednesday after the company posted strong fourth-quarter earnings on the back of its games business.
“In a law enforcement situation, of course, any company has to comply with the regulations and laws within the country,” Lau said.
Tencent’s multi-purpose WeChat service, known as Weixin on the mainland, is subject to the laws in China as well as the regulations in countries where it is in use, according to Lau.
WeChat, Tencent’s popular mobile messaging-social network-payments-and-gaming platform, surpassed 1 billion users last month.
Lau’s statement on complying with Chinese law enforcement echoed remarks made in a televised speech in 2016 by Jack Ma Yun, the founder and executive chairman of Alibaba Group Holding. Ma said Chinese authorities needed “to embrace internet data in their fight against thieves and criminals”, according to a Wall Street Journal report.