What percentage of your networth would you bet that the Chinese government can't access WeChat passwords?
To be clear, I wouldn't bet it all that the passwords are stored in plaintext. But I would bet it all that the CCP has their own special key and/or backdoor access which allows them to continue having omnipotence and omniscience while keeping pesky foreign powers out.
I doubt it. The CCP is bad, but it's also pretty rational. Doing this would just be dumb.
My first foray into options trading I lost around 3% of my net worth, and I'd say I'm more than twice as confident about this than I was about that.
I'd evaluate the odds of the CCP doing something, to be in line with the odds of them benefiting from doing something, regardless of the expense/risk to their populace.
There's nothing I'd really put past them, we know for a fact they harvest organs from political dissidents, but we're skeptical on if they'd store passwords plaintext?
Given people tend to re-use passwords, I'd imagine having a massive trove of plaintext passwords for all Chinese citizens, or even anyone who communicates with them, would be incredibly useful.
Not to mention the fact that they have to maintain a list of anti-CCP passwords, which would be a tedious process, or they'd have to automate something to detect anti-CCP sentiment. I think an interesting experiment would be to see what less obvious anti-CCP passwords get you banned. With enough probing and data, I'd possibly increase my wager to 10%.
As a well known and outspoken critic of the CCP, she might be elevated to the status where they actually just have a person reading everything she types into WeChat 24/7. Do you think they fully staff the night shift, or would the ban have taken twice as long outside of Chinese business hours?
Would I bet that the Chinese Government has this properly implemented and can't access passwords once set? Yeah no way.