Understanding China, One Blog at a Time

An American in China

China’s Xiaomi Phone Spying for Beijing

Posted by w_thames_the_d on July 30, 2014


The communist party has its hands in everything in China. Here we see that even phones used outside of China are sending your data to a communist group charged with muzzling the net and free speech.

Story

The Xiaomi Redmi Note has been a very popular product for the manufacturer. Consider that the device is a 5.5 inch phablet powered by the true octa-core MT6592 chip produced by MediaTek, and is priced at the equivalent of $130 USD. But a new report indicates that those who purchased the device might be unwillingly sending photos and texts to a server in Beijing, China.

A Xiaomi Redmi Note user in Hong Kong claims that his device has connected with an IP address in China, that was receiving content from his phone such as photos and texts. This transfer of data took place when the Redmi Note owner was on Wi-Fi. And even rooting the phone and flashing it with different firmware didn’t solve the issue.

Pictures from “Media Storage,” and texts, are being sent to the server. And lest you think that it is Xiaomi’s cloud service backing up data, the manufacturer’s MiCloud feature was turned off when this was happening. Who has control over this mysterious server in China? If you are the suspicious type, you might be thinking that the Chinese government is behind the company listed as owning the IP address. As pointed out by one of our loyal readers, looking up the owner website reveals the information that “CNNIC is the administrative agency responsible for Internet affairs under the Ministry of Information Industry of the People’s Republic of China. It is based in the Zhongguancun high tech district of Beijing.”

The bottom line is that owners of the Xiaomi Redmi Note need to be careful about the content that they are keeping on their phones.

Link
http://www.phonearena.com/news/Report-Xiaomi-Redmi-Note-sends-photos-and-texts-to-Chinese-server_id58744

One Response to “China’s Xiaomi Phone Spying for Beijing”

  1. […] Cyberwar Capabilities (2) Uber Gizmo (3) Tech World (4) Phone Arena (5) Next Powerup (6) Digit (7) China’s Xiaomi Phone Spying for Beijing (8) TSW: Is the US Becoming a Vassal State to China – Part II (9) TSW: China Brags About […]

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