Chinese services app apologizes for violating user privacy

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Diangping, China’s answer to Yelp, has apologized after a user accused it of exposing her whereabouts without authorization and violating her privacy.

The smartphone application allows users to buy movie tickets and order food. On the app, they can also browse reviews of restaurants, hotels and sightseeing spots, and comment on and check in to places they visit.

A Beijing-based user of the services platform, identified as Li, discovered last week that the app had been revealing her browsing history and comments to her friends, without her consent.

The uncomfortable experience began when Li allowed Dianping to access her personal info and contact list via WeChat, the country's most popular online messaging application, unbeknownst to her that they will publicize her activities to her circle of friends.

Dianping shared users' whereabouts with their friends after accessing their WeChat accounts. /VCG Photo

"Then I started getting feeds about what restaurants my friends are interested in, what places they have visited or what hotels they have checked in," Li told Chinese media outlet Economic Daily. "And all these people are my connections on WeChat."

Li thus began speculating that her own activities could as well be tracked by Dianping and might also had been pushed to her friends without her consent. "I use a handle when I comment, like or mark something because I like sharing my experiences with strangers [anonymously]," Li noted.

"But now that my friends in real life could track my whereabouts on Dianping. I felt very uncomfortable."

She disabled Dianping’s function that allowed her WeChat friends from finding her and blocked the review forum from accessing her social media account – but that didn't help.

She still kept seeing the activities of some of her WeChat contacts on the application’s discovery page.

The unhappy user contacted Dianping's customer service, only to be told that the application had automatically linked her to 26 of her WeChat friends, also users of Dianping. Even if access to WeChat was denied, they were still connected on the other app.

Dianping merged with Alibaba-backed food delivery Meituan to form Meituan-Dianping in 2015. /VCG Photo

Dianping came under fire for breaching users' privacy after Li's story emerged. On Monday, the company issued an apology on its Weibo account.

"We established the social networking function initially hoping to help users share their wonderful experiences in life," the statement said. "However, we have realized the function’s current design had flaws that damaged user experience. We sincerely apologize."

A Weibo user's comment under Dianping's official apology statement. /Screenshot from Weibo

"At last they learned their lessons. A lot of people stopped using the app because of this function," Weibo user @fuxingmiaomama commented.

The platform also promised to upgrade its system to better protect user privacy, adding a new function to let users disable all social networking features within the application starting July 10.