Privacy audit of the 2006 music player TTPlayer 4.6.9
A nostalgia project used REA to check whether the classic Chinese player leaked data, and found it behaved honestly.
Credits
Earliest dated source:
The full story
For a nostalgia piece, the author (KAIJI) installed TTPlayer 4.6.9 (千千静听), a hugely popular free Chinese music player built in December 2006, and used REA to audit what it sends over the internet. Its famous feature, matching lyrics to any MP3 in seconds, means it talks to servers, so the question was whether it quietly sent anything else.
It didn't. The player checks for updates (pretending to be Internet Explorer 6), searches the lyrics server and uploads lyrics anonymously. It never reads your user name or computer name: those functions aren't even in the program. Its settings live in portable files next to the app. The post also lists period curiosities, such as a test address with a typo that survived in the shipped program for twenty years.
How it was done
Tools
Themes
Loading themes…
Sources
From the maker's own write-up or code. We summarise what they report; we haven't tested it ourselves.
- REA community: 案例：用 REA 拆开 2006 年的千千静听 4.6.9（行为审计全记录）Repository account: morlutoPublished
The audit write-up (in Chinese), with the REA steps and each network request found.