WeChat advertising practices called out by watchdog group as mobile ads come under tighter scrutiny in China
- Local consumer watchdog called out WeChat, among other apps, for making it difficult for users to opt out of personalised advertising
- Mobile ad practices are facing more scrutiny in China amid a broader crackdown on big tech companies
A local consumer watchdog in China has called out Tencent Holdings’ WeChat for making it difficult for users to turn off personalised advertising or dismiss individual ads.
The Shanghai Consumer Council released a report on Wednesday highlighting problems with mobile advertising in various Chinese apps, although WeChat was the only prominent app named.
The report criticised the inability to dismiss ads on WeChat with a single click. When collapsing an ad in the popular messenger app, users must choose “not interested” and then pick a reason. WeChat’s personalised advertising, which relies on collected data to target users based on their interests, is also “extremely complicated” to disable, according to the council.
Rather than allowing users to turn off the feature from within the app, users have to scroll to the bottom of the apps’s privacy policy before being forwarded to a webpage, where they have to log in to their account again. The toggle to turn off personalised ads is “extremely covert”, and the process is loaded with “trivial” details, the council said.
Since jumping through all these hoops only disables personalised ads, the council noted that users will still see ads, albeit less relevant ones. However, the feature only stays turned off for six months before automatically being turned back on. The council recommended that users be allowed to permanently disable personalised ads.