The People's Daily on March 27 quoted a report from Jiupai News saying that the social networking platform (app) RedNote (Little Red Book) is currently facing many accusations related to the act of collecting user data beyond the scope necessary for normal operations.

These practices are said to occur with high frequency and lack transparency, raising serious concerns about users' privacy and personal data protection.

Users are constantly "scrutinized"

Jiupai reported on March 27 that many users discovered that RedNote made tens of thousands of accesses to their personal data within 30 days, even during periods when users were not directly using the application.

Specifically, a user of an Android device said that within a month, RedNote accessed a total of more than 92,000 times on the device's data, of which location data alone was accessed 71,000 times. Meanwhile, the WeChat application - the most popular platform in China - was only recorded to have accessed 911 times in the same period.

At one point, the app was recorded accessing location data 2,148 times in just one day. The user then turned off the app’s location access and switched to a mode that required manual permission for each access. The results showed that RedNote’s data access decreased sharply and returned to normal levels the next day.

According to Jiupai , another user also noted that RedNote made about 50,000 accesses to their personal data in 30 days, of which the number of accesses to location data accounted for 46,000.

Notably, at one point the app made multiple accesses to sensitive data such as device status, audio files, videos, images, and clipboard in just a short period of time.

RedNote regularly asks users to attach location information when posting on the platform. Although users can opt out, the app continues to access location data on a regular basis, raising questions about its operational transparency and user control over data.

In fact, complaints about RedNote's excessive data collection have been recorded since July 2024, with more than 70,000 discussion posts posted on the app itself. Many iOS users also said that the location icon was still displayed continuously on the screen, even when they did not open the app, indicating that the data collection was still taking place in the background.

Response from RedNote

On March 26, responding to Jiupai about related issues, RedNote's customer service representative confirmed that the collection of location data is to serve the "nearby" feature (nearby - a feature that locates users in nearby areas), and only occurs when users enable location access permissions.

The platform representative said this was normal and emphasized that RedNote will not disclose users' personal information.

However, these statements have yet to allay concerns among Chinese public opinion, especially in the context of privacy and personal data protection becoming increasingly important concerns for internet users in China and globally.