How to export WeChat (including Moments) data

1. Background knowledge

In this era, data is the means of production. With user data, accurate advertisements can be matched and recommended to users, AI algorithms can be trained, and various profitable things can be mined from big data: these directly bring real profits to enterprises. However, an obvious contradiction is that data, the means of production, is generated by users but does not belong to them, at least in mainland China and the United States. Want to export your own data from one website and import it into another website or your own website? Sorry, this option is not available. Large companies with data sovereignty are becoming larger and larger, their profits are growing, and their attitudes are becoming more and more indifferent to users. However, what do users gain?

The EU's GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) bill aims to change this situation. This bill came into effect on May 25, 2018. This bill includes many contents, one of which is relevant to this article: as long as a company operates in the EU, it must provide users with the option to export data.

Although everyone generally thinks that WeChat is a Chinese product, we found that WeChat has not withdrawn from the EU market, so it chose to comply with the GDPR. This brings us the possibility of exporting WeChat data! This article will describe in detail how to export WeChat data.

If you are careful, you may have carefully searched to see if WeChat has a button to export data. Then users in mainland China and the United States may find that there is no button at all. This is because the jurisdiction of the GDPR Act is only in the European Union, and WeChat is very stupid and only opens this function of exporting data to EU users. So the key question now becomes: How to make WeChat think that I am an EU user?

2. Obtain the phone number of the EU country

After testing, I found that the key factor for WeChat to determine whether a user is an EU user is which country the bound mobile phone number belongs to!

Then the next question is, how to get an EU mobile phone number. What is certain is that if you want to bind a mobile phone number to WeChat, you cannot fill it in casually because you need to receive a verification text message. There are many such services on the market. I use an APP called Dingtone. It only costs a few dollars to get a mobile phone number in another country.

http://dingtone.me/After downloading and installing Dingtone, select Get a Dingtone Phone Number:

The picture below is the list of countries it supports, among which Belgium and Netherlands are EU countries that are useful to us.

After selecting Belgium, you can see many available mobile phone numbers. Select one and proceed to the next steps.

3. Binding EU country numbers to WeChat

Once you have a mobile phone number, you can start to remove the original mobile phone number and bind a new mobile phone number on WeChat. The specific location is in WeChat: Settings – Account and Security – Mobile Number. Just change the bound mobile phone number here. I won’t go into details here. As long as you can receive the verification code, the binding should be successful.

After successfully binding the EU mobile phone number, you can find the button to download data. The specific location is in WeChat: Settings – Account and Security – More Security Settings – Export Personal Data, as shown in the picture:

If you are not bound to an EU mobile phone number, you will not see the export personal data button in the picture above.

4. Export WeChat data

However, when you try to click the export personal data button, you are likely to see the following screen, which says "The frequency exceeds the limit, please try again later":

In fact, anyone with a discerning eye should know that this is definitely not because the operating frequency exceeds the limit, but because of WeChat’s chicken thieves limit. My personal experience shows that this error will last for about two weeks. After two weeks, click the export personal data button and you will see the correct screen:

This requires email verification. Don’t think this step is easy. Facts have shown that emails sent by WeChat may not be received, and may enter spam. Even after successfully receiving them, I found that the title of the email was actually "锟斤拷", which is really amazing:

After successful verification, you will see the following screen:

After clicking Next you will be able to choose which data to export:

Click Next:

After clicking Confirm, WeChat will begin to prepare the data and send you an email after a short period of time. Again, I remind you that you may not receive this email, it may end up in spam, and the title when you receive it may be "锟斤拷". If you don't receive it, please try again. This email will ask you to open a connection on your computer. After opening, you need to scan the QR code:

Then you will see the download link and decompression password:

After decompressing, you can finally see your data~! The downloaded data probably looks like this:

The Moments folder is the Moments folder.

I hope this article can help everyone get back the data that should belong to them from large companies.

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