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| Chinese smartphones |
According to euronews.next, Lithuania's government has advise people to throw away their Chinese smartphones after a new report found that a mobile made by a major Chinese brand had built-in censorship capabilities.
Lithuania's National Cyber Security Center (NCSC) claims that Mi 10T 5G, made by Chinese smartphone manufacturer xiaomi can detect and block phrases like "Free Tibet", "Long live Taiwan" and "Chinese democracy movement".
This functionality is against European data protection low, and companies enable this this functionality without user's knowledge. NCSC also express concern on mi browser that xiomi's build-in browser that excess lots of users data, encrypt it and send back to Singapore server, which is again violation of European union's GDPR rule.
According to report, Huawei's built-in app store, AppGallery, posed a security threat to users by automatically redirecting searches to third-party app stores known to host malware.
At a presentation announcing the NCSC report, Lithuania's Vice Minister of National Defence Margiris Abukevičius told reporters that consumers should not buy phones from Chinese manufacturers.
Later on, Xiomi and Huawei respond that their phones do not have any censorship capabilities and they don't send any data without user's knowledge and Xiomi demanded an independent third party investigation.
This is not first time, earlier we had seen that pre installed weather app in Chinese smartphones brands don't show Arunachal Pradesh as an integrated part of India. And Indian government has already banned Mi browser along with some other apps. I was witnessed all those things but, this time I haven't used Mi 10T.
My personal opinion
I have used Xiomi smartphones as primary phone from past few years but, last year I had decided to switch on Samsung due to growing concern over security and data protection risks as per American business magazine forbes report. I can suggest you, if you have enough money to buy non-chinese smartphone, go for that.
Here is the original NCSC report.