China reveals audit of 320,000 local apps, with 34 booted from app stores and hundreds of devs warned they could suffer same fate

Through most of 2020 bans on Chinese apps have meant geopolitical strife, but China yesterday revealed it has started banning some of its own apps. The nation’s State Council Information Office yesterday gave a press conference at which officials from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and its Operation …

[PhilipN]

Man hours

Broad parameters for checking so until someone knowledgeable about such matters pipes up, assume we are talking about a minimum of 10 minutes per app (320,000 of 'em) so total man hours 3200000 /60 = > 50K hours so a team of 50 means 1,000 hours each at 10 hours a day means more than three months with no time to meet their girlfriends/boyfriends/whatever. Even 5 minutes per app = a damn long time

By which time they have to start again on all the new/updated apps.

I hope they had an app for that. Or actually I don't care.

But throws into profile the number of people FB, Twitter etc reckon they have to vet posts. Mr. Orange needs a team all to himself.

[Magani]

'Guidelines'

The 34 banned apps refused to comply with departmental directives to fix their problems...

The cynics among us might think that these poor sods are more likely to have refused to follow the party's guidelines with regard to the CCP's omniscient view of righteousness on all matters.

[John Smith 19]

" China has installed 690,000 5G " sounds pretty amazing.

But it's just a base station for every police station and local party office.

[DS999]

Re: " China has installed 690,000 5G " sounds pretty amazing.

They aren't necessarily talking about new installs. I imagine some base stations installed in the last year or two were designed to be software upgradeable to 5G.

[Anonymous Coward]

Downvote this post if you can't..

.. Explain the endgame of all your data being available.

Please. Nothing is gonna happen.

Oh no! They know what car you drive! Big deal. Nothing big has ever resulted from this that's personally affected anyone.

[Kevin McMurtrie]

Re: Downvote this post if you can't..

I'm not even going to use my imagination. Here's how personal data is being abused now:

- Spearphishing attacks

- Identity theft

- Manipulative marketing

- Manipulative social/political control

- Declined insurance services

- Criminal accusations based on flawed processing of massive personal data

- Harassing/incarcerating social/religious minorities

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Downvote this post if you can't..

What could a totalitarian surveillance state do with such data that could impact someone's life:

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/china-social-credit-system-explained

oh.

OH!

[Mark Exclamation]

Don't believe *anything* that emanates from any officially sanctioned department in China. All figures that are released are fudged to make the government look good. In reality it is all lies.

[JohnLH]

"690,000 5G base stations"

All spreading COVID-19 eh?

Or maybe not...

[JCitizen]

Chinese apps..

more likely the apps will be banned because they didn't have sufficient vulnerabilities so the PRC can keep watch on them. The apps still in the store are leaky just the way they like them. =)