“Leave your personal phones and laptops at home, the Chinese are spying on you.” The US Olympic Committee has sent numerous warnings to its athletes informing them that “any device could be monitored by the Beijing authorities” during the Winter Games. “Cell phones could also be compromised with malicious software,” reads the USOPC communication, unveiled by Wall Street Journal. The same concerns have been raised by the Olympic committees of Germany, Canada, Great Britain and the Netherlands. “The Games represent a unique opportunity for cybercrime,” explained the Canadian Olympic Committee, “limit the personal information stored on devices. Use disposable mobile phones, buy them there and deactivate them when you return.”
The perplexities are related to the My2022 app, required of all non-Chinese participants in the Snow Olympics (4-20 February): it will be used for the daily monitoring of Covid from 14 days before departure. On the application, users will have to register their state of health on a daily basis. The app is owned by a state-owned company, Beijing Financial Holdings Group. The German Olympic Committee asked athletes and insiders not to download the application at all, which has a similar purpose to the one delegations had to carry on their mobile phone before the Tokyo Olympics. My2022 has only one difference: it can also be updated via computer and therefore does not force athletes to constantly track.
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by our correspondent Gianluca Modolo
Underlines the IOC: “The user has control over My2022 and can change the settings at will during installation or later. The app can be configured by the user to disable access to files and media, camera, contacts and your position “.
The doubts about My2022 arise from a study published by Citizen Lab, a cybersecurity company: the report highlights several critical issues of the app. The words “Uyghurs”, “Xinjiang”, “Tibet”, for example, used in chat could activate Chinese censorship, while sensitive data would potentially be discovered in the face of attacks by hackers and cyber-espionage sites.
Beijing 2022 makes a wall, “the app complies with all laws on privacy”, and goes on its way.
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