Study the Great Nation is a smartphone application created around the Communist Party of China and the life of Xi Jinping.
This report documents the results of an analysis targeting the so-called “Study the Great Nation” mobile application. Cure53 was tasked with reviewing the premise of this app by the Open Technology Fund and completed the assessment in late August 2019.
To clarify the interest in this topic and scope, it should be noted that the “Study the Great Nation” mobile application has gained a massive following. Allegedly, it has been downloaded more than 100 million times. According to various sources, the app is getting heavily promoted by various powerful stakeholders, such as Chinese state media, universities, schools and similar parties.
In this context, this is an investigation into the application’s capacities and operations. In particular, Cure53 was supposed to analyze what the “Study the Great Nation” application was actually doing “under the hood”. One of the main objectives was to verify if any activities were performed by the app without the public’s awareness, i.e. as regards advertising and/or documentation. An explicit focus was therefore placed on unadvertised features which could be seen as aiding the maintainers of the app in data collection. From there, a careful leap would be made in terms of looking at ways of collecting data in a manner that violates human rights. To guarantee transparency, it should be emphasized that the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) served as a baseline for Cure53 during this project.
The full audit and report on the “Study the Great Nation” app can be found below.