Dianping (大众点评)

Is Dianping safe?

Dianping (大众点评) is safe enough for finding restaurants and booking local services in China, but it is a data-hungry app and its star ratings need a sceptical eye. Apple's label says it tracks you across other companies' apps, the privacy policy adds your installed-app list and Wi-Fi scans, and fake reviews are an industry that Dianping has to fight every year. Its regulatory record is light: one small fine in 2020, for failing to stop illegal Botox ads. We score it 47/100, a little above its owner's main app Meituan (43) and well below Tripadvisor (59).

Dianping is China's equivalent of Yelp, with reviews, photos and deals for restaurants, hair salons, gyms, clinics and hotels. It merged with Meituan in 2015. Shanghai Hantao Information Consulting runs the platform, and the App Store lists its sister company Hanhai Information Technology as the seller. It has about 2.5 million ratings on China's App Store and was fourth in Lifestyle there in October 2026.

What Dianping collects

Apple's China label lists user ID, device ID and product interaction under "Data Used to Track You". Linked to your identity are purchases, search history, phone number, customer-support messages, identifiers, usage data and crash data, plus fitness data for app features. Device ID is shared for third-party advertising. Location is listed as not linked to you.

The privacy policy, updated on 16 October 2026, goes further. For account and transaction security it collects your device identifiers, running processes, the list of installed apps, sensor data and Wi-Fi details including SSID and BSSID, and it reads Wi-Fi scan results. Location can come from GPS, Wi-Fi lists, Bluetooth and cell towers. Live streaming needs a face scan and ID number. If you allow contacts access, Dianping can use your address book, friend links and device data to recommend friends to you and you to others.

For recommendations and ads, the policy says Dianping combines your orders, browsing, searches, diet preferences, travel plans and location from different services into a user profile, and uses it to show "personalised third-party promotions". You can switch off personalised ads, but ads keep appearing. Data collected in China is stored in China; bookings for hotels and tickets abroad are sent overseas after a separate consent.

Fake reviews

The main safety question on Dianping is whether the ratings are real. Review farms sell five-star posts, and some sell one-star attacks on competitors. Dianping says it fights back: in June 2021 it reported penalising 50,000 accounts for paid praise and more than 10,000 merchants for fake orders or reviews in five months, helping market regulators act against 27 review-farm companies and police detain 11 people. A court also found a Nanjing fake-traffic company guilty of unfair competition and ordered its ringleader to pay Dianping RMB 500,000.

Those numbers show the scale of the problem as much as the response. In October 2026 Chinese media were still reporting paid "pre-made" reviews and organised negative-review gangs across review platforms. A high score on a new shop deserves the most doubt.

Merchant ads are policed too. In 2020 a market regulator found that 17 clinics on Dianping had advertised Botox and Hengli face-slimming injections, which Chinese law bars from advertising because botulinum toxin is a controlled drugControlled substanceA medicine or drug that the law restricts because it can be misused or cause dependence. Countries group them into schedules or classes.More in the glossary. It confiscated 94,600 yuan from the operator and fined it the same amount, and Dianping added the brand names to its filters. Reporters still found Hengli listings on the app soon after.

Account security

In October 2021 the businessman Wang Sicong said his Dianping account had been moved to someone else's phone number. Dianping apologised and froze the account. Southern Metropolis Daily tested the recovery flow and found that, once a user said the old number no longer worked, Dianping asked them to pick a past purchase, while a user test of the Meituan app reported that a birthday was enough. Meituan then limited rebinding to accounts that had changed number in the last six months.

We found no breach of Dianping user data. Meituan runs a security response centre for outside researchers. Reviews and comments are public, and chats with merchants are not end-to-end encryptedEnd-to-end encryptionEncryption in which only the sender and the recipient can read a message. The company running the service cannot see its content.More in the glossary.

How to use Dianping more safely

1. Read the newest reviews with photos and check the rating spread; ignore deals that pay for a good review.
2. Switch off personalised ads and recommendations under My, Settings, Privacy management, Personalised settings.
3. Do not grant contacts access unless you want friend features; deny location when you are just browsing a city.
4. Add a strong password and keep your phone number current, so the account cannot be moved through recovery.
5. Pay inside the app. If a shop asks you to pay by personal transfer, you lose the in-app refund route.

How we scored it

The regulatory record (82) is the strongest factor: one small 2020 fine over merchant ads, and no privacy fine or order. Privacy (31) is the weakest, because of tracking, the installed-app list and cross-service profiles. Scams and harmful content (45) reflects the steady trade in fake reviews, and security (48) the 2021 account-recovery weakness.