(Bloomberg) -- JD Finance apologized for a function on its app that stored screenshots of other programs on users’ mobile devices, sparking concern about possible online privacy breaches.
The company allowed the storage of screenshots to enable its clients to pass on images more quickly, it said in an emailed statement on Saturday. The function has now been removed and company had no access to the photos taken, it said.
A video on Weibo, China’s answer to Twitter, showed how the JD Finance app that was running in the background saved a screenshot of a banking app and appeared as a file in JD Finance’s program. It was viewed more than 2.5 million times within a day.
The incident came even after four government agencies including the Office of Central Cyberspace Affairs Commission and the Ministry of Public Security issued a joint announcement in January to rectify "excessive collecting" of personal information of users by Chinese apps.
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