The Chinese government is forcing some of the ethnic minorities to install a smartphone application that would help monitor their activities, with law enforcement warning that those who do not comply would be detained for up to 10 days.

The initiative was started in Xinjiang in western China, with authorities sending a message via WeChat to residents in Urumqi requiring them to install an Android application called Jingwang whose role is to spy on users and detect any possible “terrorist and illegal religious videos, images, e-books, and electronic documents.”

Most of the people in the region are part of the Muslim minority, according to local media, and the message is being spread in both Mandarin and Uyghur, with the latter being the language spoken by the ethnic group called Uighur, whose population counts 8 million people.

Android app to spy on users

The message also includes a QR code to download the app, along with a warning that those who do not install the application would be detained for up to 10 days.

Law enforcement warns that random checks would be performed in the coming weeks to make sure that everyone installs the app and no infringing content is stored on the devices. If the app is running and content that violates the guidelines is detected, users are prompted to delete it. Those who do not comply are also detained, the police warns.

The app can spy on the majority of activities performed on the phone, with logged data including conversations on WeChat and Weibo, two of the most popular communication platforms in China.

Information like Wi-Fi login details, device IMEI, and SIM card data is also collected and transferred to a government server, along with information on the media files stored on the device and which are compared to digital signatures of content flagged as infringing or linked with terrorist activity.

At first glance, the spying efforts only seem to be targeted at Android devices, but given that iOS is running on less than 10 percent of the devices in China, there’s a good chance that most people who are part of the minority group are affected.