It doesn’t matter if it’s a Huawei or some American phone, China, USA and others will spy on you no matter what phone you choose only the means differ. If you buy a Huawei china will have backdoors in your phone and the USA will buy all your info and if you get an American phone the USA will have backdoors and china will buy the data.
Also I find the focus on china kinda weird. I ultimately don’t want anyone stealing my data, not even the USA. Just like china the USA has been involved in mass surveillance and a lot of war crimes. For example American soldiers have been found guilty of rapping and killing children. From Wikipedia (United States war crimes > war on terror > Iraq war):
On 12 March 2006, a 14-year-old Iraqi girl named Abeer Qassim Hamza al-Janabi was raped and subsequently murdered along with her 34-year-old mother Fakhriyah Taha Muhasen, 45-year-old father Qassim Hamza Raheem, and 6-year-old sister Hadeel Qassim Hamza al-Janabi.
After all of that I want to ask you one question, do you really want the USA sterling your data?
Also what you answer that question with doesn’t matter since both china and the USA will be stealing your data no matter if you want it or which phone you buy.
As a final note I should maybe mention that I’m not American if you haven’t figured that out yet. Also please don’t accuse me of spreading Chinese propaganda. I’m advocating against the USA and the CIA, not for china.
Also sorry for being so political in a kind of not that political thread.
But it sounds like you are advocating for china. Look how much you wrote about another country when someone asked specifically about china and a Chinese phone manufactured in china.
My point is just that I don’t want anyone spying on me and it doesn’t matter if the one spying is the US, china, french or russia. They have nothing to do with my personal data.
You’re missing the point entirely. In the US, companies can take the federal government to court to stop them. When agencies installed backdoors on Cisco equipment it was done through intercepting hardware through carriers, and individually installing them on targeted hardware. Not forcing Cisco to hand over access to every router they sold. You can argue about whether they should do that at all, but it’s not the same.
Thank you. This is an important correction but does hover not mean that the US government isn’t spying on you through your phone, just that they, if they do it, have other means to do so. 2017 wikileaks revealed that the CIA had an immense collection of tools to hack personal phones and computers. But this probably means that they don’t hack everyone just people of special interest, which is good news 😀
Here is the wikileaks article and here is an yahoo article.
EDIT: of course they can also buy the data from Google.
So if i want China to not have my data i should by a chinese phone?
/s
So far, all of Huawei’s found potential backdoors turned out to be them being extremely terrible at writing secure software or developing secure operating procedures. No proof of backdoors just yet.
They’ve been executing corporate espionage for ages, though, so they can’t exactly be trusted if you work in a field that may be interesting to Chinese competition.
It’s kind of how Facebook has never been caught watching random people through your smartphone’s webcam, but you wouldn’t want that Facebook video calling thing watching you all day.
If there is a backdoor somewhere, we probably wouldn’t know about it, or it’d be on the front page of every non-Chinese affiliated news article.
So far, all of Huawei’s found potential backdoors turned out to be them being extremely terrible at writing secure software or developing secure operating procedures.
That’s how you write a backdoor in 2023 “oops… Guess I made a mistake again”
That was always the defence, but by that standard every piece of software is full of bugs. Microsoft Windows? Gets ten to twenty backdoors closed every month! Linux? Backdoors are closed weekly! WordPress plugins? Those are just backdoors that come with a theme!
No Cisco-style obfuscated, hard-coded admin password has ever been found in Huawei stuff. Their firmware was behind on security patches for open source software and I believe they did some firmware updates over HTTP, but in that area they’re not much worse than any of their competitors. When Vodafone did a vulnerability assessment of their network, which then got leaked, Bloomberg called telnet (within an air-gapped network) a “backdoor”, but Vodafone itself denies that. The biggest issue I remember Vodafone finding was the fact that Huawei tried to get remote management on the devices they installed so they didn’t need to be sent out to the field every time they needed to do maintenance; not uncommon for network vendors, but obviously not acceptable within carrier networks with locked-down security controls.
If there are real backdoors, then Huawei is just better at hiding them than their western counterparts. All we have to go on right now is secret documents from government agencies that pinky-swear that they really found backdoors that no independent researcher has been able to verify. There are a lot of wild stories about Huawei backdoors on the internet, but I have yet to see proof of any of a real backdoor.
if you work in a field that may be interesting to Chinese competition.
So, nearly everything then
I don’t think gardeners, builders, farmers, or waiters have anything to fear. If your company is targeting locals and not doing any R&D, most data they can extract through espionage is useless. It’s not entirely black-and-white.
They’ve never been caught abusing their software for espionage, it’s always their business people or the engineers they send over for meetings, with maybe a few planted employees, and possibly co-conspirators in universities and other Chinese institutions. They’ll also been caught being rather hacker-friendly, but no direct ties have been proven just yet.
Their people cannot be trusted and their software developers are either malicious or dangerously incompetent. Neither is proof of any backdoor, but both are good reasons to avoid them.
They certainly have little interest in you if you’re a waiter at some shitty restaurant, sure. But do you really think they don’t target the agricultural, construction or food industries and the technologies they may be developing?
Your average farmer isn’t developing any new crops, your average builder isn’t designing new construction mechanisms, and your average restaurant isn’t developing a new way to cook food. There are specific R&D centers for all that stuff. At best, the end users of that technology get to beta-test the functionality.
There are exception to everything, but farmers wouldn’t be remortgaging their homes for drones and millimeter-precision GPS systems if they could just build that tech themselves.
I’m talking about the industry, not the individual.
Yes.
Also phones made in the US have back doors that the US government can access. It’s not really secret.
Why do these threads always circle back to the US? It’s always the obnoxious “USA bad because other country bad”
And no, I’m not American
It’s just pointing out that chinese are not the only people to spy on you
It’s secret like Area 51 is secret. We know it’s there, we know the government is doing something with it, but we don’t know fully what, when, why, or how.
I don’t think the US Govt backdoors phones anymore … mostly because they don’t need to. They find other ways to get the information, like warrantless surveillance of Google and Apple notification servers.
The other reason I don’t think it happens is that there are just too many security researchers trying to find exploits and backdoors. Also it’s pretty well known that any backdoor can be used against you. The NSA has an interest in domestic phones being secure.
Granted, international models might have some alterations/backdoors… Even then, that would be egg on the face that they don’t really need if they got caught with a backdoor that applied only to international phones.
Have no idea…all I know is, everything is manufatcured in the PCR.
PRC*
PCR is funny, though
Probably. Also, look at myactivity.google.com . Any info you have there can be handed over to a government
Well I’m fucked. Thanks for sharing that link, I had no idea Google tracked what time I used Signal messenger.
Not sure what to do with this information but I didn’t realize it was that granular.
Yeah. You can turn it off or set it to delete, and I think legally Google do have to keep their word on that thankfully, but some weird shenanigans happened with incognito mode on Chrome
not trying to argue ‘both-sides’, but most likely so does the US government/five eyes/whatever for android (and sometimes ios)
I mean, it’s written into law in Australia https://fee.org/articles/australia-s-unprecedented-encryption-law-is-a-threat-to-global-privacy/
And you can be sure that data is shared with 5eyes.
Short answer is “likely”.
If you work in a field with sensitive data (financial, healthcare, technology, politics) you don’t get a phone designed by a China-government owned company.
You don’t really want a device linked to any third party to be fair.
They all have some kind of backdoors that governments exploit. If I could buy a phone and use it knowing that only the Chinese government could spy on me with it, I would absolutely get that. I live in the US though. If I lived in China I would prefer the US-only spy phone.
I’m sure it’s nothing in comparison to what the CCP get from TikTok
If Lenovo’s multiple rootkit fiascos are anything to go by for Chinese-corporation-designed electronics, yes.
Most of Lenovo’s rootkit fiascos are due to lack of vetting bundleware providers though; Huawei is actually unlikely to have a backdoor in their phones. Their 5G infrastructure on the other hand is known to have at least two different potential backdoors designed in such a way that they may just be a chain of unfortunate vulnerabilities. Or not.
It wouldn’t be very secret if it was published on the internet. It’s definitely a credible concern given the level of control China demands of companies operating in the country. The US also essentially has backdoors into most communication, and possibly phones as well, so it’s not that crazy for China to also have them.
China is also very aggressive in hacking into companies. Even if they didn’t have a custom backdoor, them finding a way in and essentially banning Huawei from fixing it, is another option.
I was under the impression it was was common knowledge/rumor that Cisco hardware all has a US installed backdoor. Huawai having a backdoor specifically wasn’t the big revelation/concern. It was that it was Chinese/foreign government controlled. Everyone puts backdoors in, it’s just a matter of only having friendly backdoors you can control.
The rumor probably exists, but the US seems to just bully companies into getting access rather than building back doors into equipment, based on available evidence. They do maintain unpublished 0 day exploits though, so it could also be both.
Probably, but iPhones and Android have them for the Five Eyes and anyone else who is willing to pay/push for laws to make it happen. All you do with a phone is pick your poison, do you want China to spy on you, or America, the UK, or some other government or company who then sells it to the highest bidder.
Any cell phone, dumb or smart, is a tracking device. The smarter it is, the better it is as snooping on you. Doesn’t matter how or where the phone’s hardware is made, it’s going to track you without consent. You just need to ask “Am I worried about China or am I worried about another government?” to even “If the backdoor is big enough, can third parties get me too as I walk by on the street?”
yea phones constantly ping something so at least the network operator can map out where it has been with good accuracy if you become person of interest
Are you the FBI? You have to tell us, you can’t lie.
Just as much as the US government has.
