How much do you value your privacy and security? Researchers at Black Hat found a series of phones that are secretly sending data to Chinese servers.

Don’t buy BLU phones

  • Ghast@lemmy.ml
    10·
    2 years ago

    Time to root and flash, though I really wish that was an easier process. It’s a different process and set of downloads for each phone.

    • Subversivo@lemmy.mlB
      7·
      2 years ago

      Sadly manufacturers try to make as hard as possible to install a clean android without adware/spyware.

  • peeonyou@lemmy.ml
    6·
    2 years ago

    This is the same thing that US companies do as well no? I mean, you can’t use an electronic device without the US capturing information about it.

    • Subversivo@lemmy.mlB
      3·
      2 years ago

      Not. USA includes tracker on user installed apps*. This article tells about apps provided by the manufacturer that the user can’t uninstall.

      • Google collect many info about you with their mandatory Google account, but not “personal” as installed apps or messages, only “not personal”, as location", sites you search about, news you click click, and so…
    • Subversivo@lemmy.mlB
      5·
      2 years ago

      Ask Facebook, who read SMS and sent it to Facebook servers for years and was discovered only because they made the mistake to include the SMS on takeout data.

      • XpeeN
        3·
        2 years ago

        That’s fucked up. At least no one uses SMS anymore lol. Honestly I think we should use apps only when nessesary, and just use websites instead. They’re all mobile compatible anyway

          • XpeeN
            2·
            2 years ago

            That’s so dumb, at least WhatsApp is e2ee. Using SMS these days is just asking for trouble lol

          • d-RLY?@lemmy.ml
            2·
            2 years ago

            SMS is a fallback for iMessage. If two iPhone users send messages via iMessage, it is done through that service’s message type. But if they get or send messages to a non-iPhone user, it falls back on SMS. Which is why they have the blue (iMessage) and green (SMS) bubbles. So it is mostly about it just being a universal format if all you know is someone’s phone number. Which is why a lot of other message apps will also do both. Though I think we will see fewer SMS used as people are getting used to having their contacts auto-added to one or more of the chat apps (assuming they don’t opt-out of that feature). But I also think SMS is too universal to just completely go away all together. As it is the easiest way to send out an emergency alert or something else like that in a way that all carriers can 100% use.