At WeChat, user privacy and data protection are our top priorities. WeChat considers user privacy and data protection not just our company's responsibility, but also a key part of our users' experience.

WeChat securely encrypts your sent and received messages between our servers and your device to help prevent unauthorized third parties from intercepting your messages as they are being delivered over the internet. WeChat uses industry-standard encryption practices and technologies, including specifically the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) 256, to protect the security and confidentiality of data during transit and at rest. The AES algorithm was and remains approved by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to encrypt U.S. federal sensitive (unclassified) information. AES-256 uses 256 bits to encrypt data and is currently the maximum available under the AES algorithm (as compared to AES-128 and AES-192).

To better maintain the privacy of your messages, it's important to make sure that you follow some safety tips. Read more about how to best secure your WeChat account on all of your devices.

We do not permanently retain the content of any messages on our servers whether they are text, audio or rich media files such as photos, videos, or documents, unless you or your recipient saves them as a Favorite, or it is a message the administrator of your group chat added as a Group Notice. Once 72 hours has lapsed since you sent your chat message, or 120 hours for images, audio, videos, and files, WeChat permanently deletes the content of the message on our servers. You may at any time remove any message content from Favorites and it will be deleted from our servers. Upon deletion, neither WeChat nor any and third party will be able to view the content of your message. 

When you long-press a message and select Translate, the message may be translated via a third-party translation service provider. Our service providers are required to provide the same or equal protection of user data as stated in the WeChat Privacy Policy and are prohibited from retaining, using, or disclosing your information except as necessary to provide services to us.

WeChat also does not use the content of chat messages for analytical purposes or data mining.