- All participants of the upcoming Olympics in
China must download the MY2022 app before arriving. - The app can ban words that are critical of China or note Uyghur oppression, CitizenLab found.
China's official and mandatory 2022
China rolled out the MY2022 app to keep track of attendees' health status, engage in chat rooms, and keep people informed about proceedings. All athletes and visitors must download the app.
However, an analysis published Tuesday by CitizenLab at the University of Toronto, found that the app had security flaws and also contained a function named "illegalwords.txt."
The list of text contained 2,442 keywords that are "considered politically sensitive in China," the report said.
The function is inactive on the app at the moment, the report said.
Examples of banned words and phrases in the Chinese language include "China evil" and "Chinese are all dogs."
The list also include the Uyghur-language phrases "forced patrols" and "forced demolition," apparent references to the demolition of mosques in the Xinjiang region, where China surveils and has detained more than one million members of the Muslim-majority community in reeducation camps since at least 2016. The words "the Holy Quran" in the Uyghur language are also on that list.
Chinese apps and social-media sites have a long history of censoring content, ranging from scrubbing references to the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre from the internet to the silencing of COVID-19 whistleblowers.
The livestreaming app YY and messaging platform WeChat already censor a number of Uyghur words, the CitizenLab report said.
Users of the MY2022 app can also report comments they deem to be "politically sensitive," the report said.
"The reporting feature is not novel or unusual for Chinese applications. However, it may potentially lead to non-transparent content removal and malicious reporting," the researchers said.
On Tuesday, the Australian cybersecurity company Internet 2.0 advised athletes travtling to the games to bring burner phones.
"This will protect their sim information of their devices that they use in their home country," the company said.
The CitizenLab report also highlighted that the app had several security flaws in how it deals with users' private information.
The Chinese Embassy in Ottawa, Canada, said on Wednesday that the CitizenLab report was inaccurate.
"There's no need to worry about cyber security," a embassy spokesperson said, according to the state-run Global Times newspaper. "China has always been against and will crack down upon any kinds of cyber attacks and cyber stalking."
The International Olympic Committee has defended the app, saying experts had assessed it to have "no critical vulnerabilities," Deutsche Welle reported.