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muad_dibber@lemmygrad.ml

Today I got hit with the "china spyware" claim and would love some debunking (arxiv.org)

submitted 4 days ago by haui@lemmygrad.ml to c/technology@lemmygrad.ml

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I visited a talk on an event of the german chaos computer club and although I know about the casual chauvinism in these circles, I was appaled at the casual racist remarks AND I'm curious about the "china spyware android" claim. Knowing from my experience with ML so far its probably bs or overblown but I'm curious if there is a thorough debunk already.

The person holding the talk claimed that chinese android phones came loaded with spyware and I gound the linked study that is claimed to prove it. I'll check it more thoroughly tomorrow but so far it reads like "different legislation, get over it" but i'm not sure if its even easier to debunk.

Have a good one.

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[–] ksynwa@lemmygrad.ml 19 points 4 days ago (1 children)

It just seems like Chinese privacy and data protection regulations haven't caught up yet so Chinese mobile phone companies are abusing that in China:

In this work we study the Chinese version of the Android OS distributions run by Xiaomi, Realme, and OnePlus handsets. We measure the network traffic the handsets generate when in-use by a privacy-aware consumer. We find that these devices come bundled with a number of third-party applications, some of which are granted dangerous runtime permissions by default without user consent, and transmit traffic containing a broad range of geolocation, user-profile and social relationships PII to both phone vendors and third-party domains, without notifying the user or offering the choice to opt-out. In contrast, the data shared by the Global version of the firmware is mostly limited to device-specific information.

It's awful but "Chinese spyware" claims make it sound like sneaky sinister Chinese have spun a world-wide web to spy on people all over the globe but that is not what is happening. I hope Chines phone companies become less abusive and exploitative towards their paying customers though.

[–] haui@lemmygrad.ml 7 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Thank you so much for helping! This is pretty close to my impression as well and helps a great deal still. Have a good one! :)

[–] zanghor123@lemmygrad.ml 5 points 3 days ago

Xiaomi is ad based, that's what the traffick is showing