Of course, if you buy an iPhone in Europe, and you want to use it any significant manner, you're getting spied on by US agencies as well:<p>- GPS: the wifi and celltower db queries that optimize the service are transferred into a foreign country.<p>- use Siri: uploads your whole address book to US servers before use<p>- use iCloud tabs: every URL you visit it uploaded to Apple's US servers<p>- turn on the only cloud backup solution available on the device, and all your data, including every SMS, every call and all your most private notes and photos are also transferred into the foreign country of the US, with a chance of it being analyzed by certain agencies.<p>In other words, this might qualify as getting spied on as well.
I wouldn't try to minimize this issue - it's terrible that the Chinese are trying to fit spyware into unbranded phones like this. Perhaps the bright side here is that when the Chinese do try to commit electronic espionage, they're pretty clumsy about it.<p>BUT...<p>Given the way smartphones everywhere are made - China and elsewhere - it's impossible for even technical users to know that their phones aren't spying on them. While most of the software running on your smartphone's application processor is now open-source (if you're in the Android majority), the software running on the baseband processor is 100% closed source and secret. We don't know anything about the horrible agreements that have been made between shady government agencies and the baseband manufacturers like Qualcom.
Am I the only one to find this article really thin ?
Where is the disassembled code ? To whom the public key that signed the software belongs too ?
Which server it sends the info to exactly ?<p>If you start to get as paranoid as the entire forum is at the moment accusing blindly Apple, Google, Qualcomm etc. Why nobody asks for a simple piece of evidence for <i>anything</i> ? This could really be a cheap manipulation ...<p>Edit: grammar
Um, why is there a running assumption that this is the Chinese <i>government</i>?<p>A Chinese manufacturer has even <i>more</i> incentive to steal information and sell it given the razor thin margins on making these phones.
More info here, this has been known for some time already:<p><a href="http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?p=53391745" rel="nofollow">http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?p=53391745</a><p><a href="http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2395007" rel="nofollow">http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2395007</a><p>Fortunately the solution is pretty simple, as these generic MTK devices are all easy to root and reflash with new firmware.
There's a ton of these generic MTK-processor-based phones available online; I bought and played with a few a year or two ago. They range from "really crappy" to "pretty nice", but in most all cases you're stuck with the version of Android that they ship with, as there's no ongoing support, no upgrades from the vendor, etc.