Jane Wong explains why she uncovers hidden app features that tech giants like Facebook want to keep secret
Jane Wong explains why she uncovers hidden app features
that tech giants like Facebook want to keep secret
The UMass-Dartmouth undergrad wants to understand what
tech companies are doing with user data
PUBLISHED: Monday, 26 November, 2018, 12:25pm
Jane Manchun Wong is an introvert who fades into a crowd.
But in the geeky world of app reverse-engineering (yes, there’s such a thing),
the 23-year-old Hong Kong-born Ivy Leaguer is a rock star.
The computer science major at University of Massachusetts
Dartmouth has made a name for herself in tech circles by uncovering hidden app
features that the likes of Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat want to keep under
wraps.
Now on a gap year back home, we met at the Strokes, an
indoor mini-golf club in Hong Kong’s Causeway Bay shopping district. I had
hoped that doing an activity together would help break the ice, and because
watching her spend hours analysing source code did not seem particularly
exciting. Besides, I was good at mini-golf.
We teed off at the 11th hole of the 18-hole course,
located in a section that for reasons unknown is designed to look like a
swimming pool. She manages to sink the ball on her sixth attempt and lets out a
victorious “Yes!”
“This is fun, figuring out where I should aim when I hit
the ball,” she said. “It’s similar to when I’m trying to pick up my workflow
when a new app update is released, you have to try and get the hang of it but
once you do, it’s really fun.”
Wong was the first to discover that Facebook Messenger
was testing an “unsend message” option and that Instagram was working on
allowing users to geofence their posts and stories, limiting content visibility
to specific countries and regions.
Many tech publications follow her Twitter posts and some
have offered to pay her if she would reverse-engineer apps for them
exclusively. However, Wong always rejects such offers.
“I believe information like this should be free and
accessible to all, so I’d rather just post about it on Twitter,” she said. “I’m
not doing it for the money.”
What she is trying to do is peel back the layers of
opacity surrounding what technology companies do with our data.
Once, she discovered that users who granted permissions
for Facebook’s Android to access location and phone data were also allowing the
app to scan and send data like nearby cell tower information and available
Wi-fi networks in the vicinity of its servers.
Such information could potentially be used to determine a
more precise location of where users live, possibly even who their neighbours
are, Wong said.
“These apps are on my phone, but at the end of the day I
want to know exactly what the technology is doing on my device, how they are
using it to collect data beyond the vague ‘bug fixes and improvements’ app
update notes,” she said. “Not truly knowing what apps can do on your phone is
like having an unknown, sealed box sitting in your home, and you have no idea
what it does or contains.”
Wong recalls developing an interest in computers at a
young age. At the age of seven, her parents allowed her to go online but
strictly monitored her usage, implementing parental controls on the internet
Explorer web browser out of fear that she might end up on harmful internet
sites.
Undeterred, Wong circumvented this by installing the
Firefox browser, which prompted her parents to install a password on the
Windows operating system. So she went to the library, borrowed a book on the
Linux operating system that came with an installation CD-ROM and figured out
how to install the open-source system to replace Windows.
“They could not stop me, I was so determined,” she
chuckled. “They even tried to put a password on the computer but I reset the
entire motherboard to get around it and eventually they gave up and let me
tinker on the computer, albeit without internet access.”
Today, whenever US technology companies release a new
updates, Wong hunkers down and spends anywhere from 30 minutes to several hours
combing through code and figuring out what’s new.
Wong has also attempted to reverse-engineer Chinese apps
such as Musical.ly (now merged with TikTok), but said that she did not find
anything that was of particular interest to her.
She has yet to reverse engineer Tencent’s WeChat, with
more than 1 billion monthly active users, because she is uncomfortable with the
mandatory identity verification and censorship on the app, she said.
Being Asian and female means that Wong is still a
relative minority in the generally male-dominated tech scene. Her ethnicity has
on occasion made her the target of personal attacks, and sometimes naysayers
cast doubt over whether she works independently.
“Sometimes, there are people in the community who doubt
my work, and wonder if I have a team that helps me with reverse-engineering
apps,” Wong said. “People need to realise that gender does not affect a
person’s capability in tech, men and women are equally capable.”
And in case you were wondering, I won at the mini-golf,
though I think she might give me a run for my money the next time we play.
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