What you need to know about Meiya Pico, China’s low-profile forensics champion named in data privacy scandal

Most people in China had not heard of Xiamen Meiya Pico Information Co – until it caught the attention of officials in the Trump administration and subsequently was named in a data privacy scandal.

The 20-year-old company based in China’s coastal province of Fujian is believed to be linked to a spy app used by Chinese police to extract data from citizens’ smartphones during random street checks, according to a recent Financial Times report. The app known as MFSocket provides access to images and audio files, location data, call logs, messages and the phone’s calendar and contacts, including those used in the messaging app Telegram, French security researcher Baptiste Robert said after conducting research into the app.

When reached by the South China Morning Post last week, Robert said his research into MFsocket, which was based on the information available on the internet, showed that Meiya Pico’s name was on the certificate used when signing the app. Meiya Pico did not respond to a request for comment.

Meiya Pico received global attention after Bloomberg reported in May that the Trump administration was considering adding the company, as well as four other Chinese surveillance tech companies, on its trade blacklist over concerns about their role in helping Beijing repress minority Uygurs in China’s west. The latest concern is that the app developed by Meiya Pico is now being used outside Xinjiang as part of China’s so-called surveillance state after several Chinese netizens complained on social media about the police installing MFSocket on their smartphones.

A Chinese internet user complained on the country’s biggest search engine Baidu, asking advice in a Q&A forum after a police officer installed MFSocket on his smartphone during a routine traffic stop. Another user in the same forum asked about the function of the app after he found the software on his phone.

Meiya Pico’s eight-year-old online store on Taobao marketplace, one of China’s largest e-commerce platforms, has only 700 followers compared to more than 10 million for Apple’s six-year-old store on the site.