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F-Secure: Xiaomi Smartphones Do Secretly Steal Your Data
They may be well reviewed and China's new top selling phone, but reader DavidGilbert99 writes with reason to be cautious about Xiaomi's phones: Finnish security firm F-Secure has seemingly proven that Xiaomi smartphones do in fact upload user data without their permission/knowledge despite the company strongly denying these allegations as late as 30 July. Between commercial malware and government agencies, how do you keep your phone's data relatively private?
"By not having one" comment
One could always try one of these...
Nice little phone
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Xiaomi smartphones do in fact upload user data without their permission/knowledge
Considering that half the apps out there (and I mean benign/legitimate apps!) seem to upload user data without user's knowledge, that is not so shocking. Once you start using your phone, several apps will start siphoning your data.
Recent "simplification" of Android Google-store permissions means that I don't even know how much of a permission I am giving to a new app.
I want it totally private. Has the concept of privacy gotten so totally lost that people seem okay to settle for relative privacy?
By the way, the best way to keep your data private is to keep it out of your untrusted phone/computer/whatnot, and use bogus data when you need to enter something.
Exemples: use "Acme inc." as your home phone number's name in your addressbook, and nicknames for your contacts. Don't enter your full address as your home in your satnav's app but someone's address in a street close-by, etc.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Depends: European or African thing?
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Oh, someone swears it's all a-okay. I'm totally reassured now...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
So far, all they've found it doing is reporting the IMEI by sending an HTTP GET http://api.account.xiaomi.com/pass/v3/user@id?type=MXPH&externalId=01, The data is transmitted as a cookie of the form deviceId=IMEI . (The API returns a brief reply in JSON.) That tells them the phone has connected to the phone network, and its IP address. That's not particularly interesting information. The carrier knows the IMEI number, too, of course. Perhaps this is to check up on whether carrier-reported sales data matches actual phones coming on the air.
Carriers, app vendors, Microsoft, Google, and Apple collect far more data than that. There are way too many things phoning home with the user's contact list and other personal info.
Well he was one hell of a lot more convincing than you.
Which was not difficult.
Look, these days if you want to be safe, do not use a smartphone. Get a dumb phone, then you don't have to worry about any apps leaking your data.
Either an app will leak your data, someone will hack your phone, you leave it somewhere or someone steals it. Either way, you are screwed if you use your phone for all sorts of personal/business stuff.
I guess it's about convenience over personal/financial/business safety.
Be seeing you...
The allegations are specific, proven and Hugo Barra denies different allegations. A simple PR trick.
"We saw that on startup, the phone sent the telco name to the server api.account.xiaomi.com. It also sent IMEI and phone number to the same server," F-Secure said.
So Barra denies it sends PHOTOS and TEXT MESSAGES to China without permission. He does not deny it sends to PHONE NUMBERS and IMEI details without permission.
This is a classic PR misdirection strategy. Mi Cloud was not turned on when it sent this information, the phone was straight out of the box. So turning off Mi Cloud does not fix this spyware.
It's as simple as that. It doesn't matter if you turn on mobile data as long as that is under the control of the phone's operating system, and it doesn't matter if you pay attention to your cell phone bill, as traffic to and from specific government servers is likely exempt from the monthly traffic calculations just as the provider's own servers are likely to be. It doesn't matter if you monitor your wireless network, since questionable transmissions are likely to only go through mobile data, as that's harder to monitor.
While you may be able to test this with your own base station, the phone might also detect that it's not on an official network and therefore not do anything, but that's probably taking it a bit far.
While you could switch to a "dumb" phone, those are of course also trackable, and your conversations and messages can still be monitored, so I don't see any real gain there.
Myself, I carry a phone with me all the time, but I simply do not treat it as a secure device. If you want to take private pictures with your girlfriend, for instance, your phone is not the camera you want to use. End of story.
Get a Blackphone
...because its manufacturer assures you it's secure!
There is no privacy. I knew a man who repaired pagers and police radios, etc. He worked in a small shop that was surrounded by copper screens and everything was grounded to eliminate any stray signals. Think of a clean room. So who can live like that?
I want one...
But perhaps they struggle to find buyers is largely because there is no pre order option or let me know when it is availible option that I can find on their website. Maybe they could set up something like an if interested in owning one of these, keep me informed something or other. There is only a donate button and I don't wish to fund a project, I wish to purchase the results of it if the price is right- and we won't know that until it's shipping or ready to ship.
Because the American phone manufacturers don't do the same thing?
http://online.wsj.com/news/art...
Don't trust any company with your personal information - or accept that it's going to be shared with whoever has the money to pay for it, or the power to grab it.
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
Please, somebody tell the Chinese that this is not a feature users want, even if all the bog vendors have implemented it!
...the sky is blue.
Carry on.
Written by people that care about your privacy.
Surely I'm not the only one who looks at the supercomputer in her pocket which is capable of speaker independent voice recognition, and often wonders whether encrypted text versions of *all* the conversations she's been having in its proximity are getting squirted off somewhere s33kr1t in the middle of the night, when no-one would notice a stray packet or two...
Frankly at this point, I'd rather the Chinese have my data to be honest. They won't share it with the Australian/Five eyes governments, and since I live ina Five eyes country, that works better for me. It's not like they'll put me in a prison from China for some BS they find on my phone. My own government on the other hand is much more likely to screw up my life using my own private data.
The data is copied, not "stolen". Get it right!
Using a dumb phone is not a solution. Everything a dumb phone does, by which I mean mainly messaging and phone calls, can be monitored anyway, as well as the location of the phone, by triangulation. All this means is that you lose features with implied privacy issues by going from a smart to a dumb phone, but are left with the remaining features that also have privacy issues.
There are 4 main smartphone brands:
Apple is in the hardware business. Their goal is to sell you hardware with a basket of software that enhances the experiences and showcases the hardware.
Blackberry is in the enterprise software business. Their goal is to sell you hardware that ties you to a management system from which they make their margin.
Microsoft is in the productivity software business. Their goal is to sell you an endpoint that showcases the features of their productivity suites including their server / cloud based collaboration tools.
Google is in the advertising business. Their goal is to sell you an endpoint that showcases their web services. Those web services are designed to collect information about you to sell to advertisers.
Of those 4 companies which do you think you are going to have the toughest time with privacy? If you care about privacy and don't have a strong reason to pick Android, don't use Android, it is quite obviously going to have to be the worst of the 4. You are going to have to cut against the grain to be secure and be on a platform designed advertisers. The other 3 while they may have problems are all much much better on privacy. Blackberry's balance feature allows you to create a container which divides your data a secure side and an insecure side. They offer things like secure browsing by default. You want security choose an operating system designed to enhance not reduce security. Apple and Microsoft are sort of midpoints. Apple is very good about now allowing applications to upload data you don't know about sharing between apps is off by default. Microsoft emulated the Apple sandboxing, certification and limited interaction approach we'll see if overtime they maintain it. If you want to use these devices and have secure data something like Good's containers (which do work on Android) provide a pretty excellent way to keep specific data associated with specific applications secure.
> Unfortunately, that won't help. Your phone number(s) and your home address are already on many of your friend's devices under your real name. Apple, Google & Co already have your details [...]
While it's important to keep that in mind, the "this won't help" mindset is a classical fallacy: someone gotta start, and if (and when) it's widespread enough, it'l help all of us. Like higiene.
You don't spit on the roads, do you? Or do you shit out your window?
So if you implement that -- have a talk with your friends about it too.
Well not really, because *everybody* has to do it or it's useless, and since your phone number could easily be in 100 phonebooks that's alot of poisoning to do. And As soon as people start doing it in numbers you can imagine a malicious Google (or whatever) would implement anti-poisoning analysis.
I believe the only real solution, which is unpopular on this largely libertarian site, is to have stronger protections in law, making data about you your property and controlled as such, and penalties for misuse the same seriousness as theft. That's a long way from where we are now though.
So should "find restaurants near me" apps instead require users to download the complete list of worldwide restaurants? Because even clicking on a map or entering a postal code is "location data". Another is to satisfy movie studios that refuse to license works for streaming unless the provider can positively match viewers to a country whitelist.
But perhaps they struggle to find buyers is largely because there is no pre order option
Perhaps that's because payment processors want a ship date in the next 30 days. OpenPandora had to refund a lot of preorders when it couldn't ship in that time frame.
Location data and contact/address data are sensitive yet inextricably linked to how people use trackers (also known as cell phones and other portable electronic devices). Whether the device conveys GPS coordinates, can be tracked to a remarkably small area via cell tower triangulation, or unknown (to the user) parties get the information from a proprietor (such as Apple), the privacy loss inherent in ordinary tracker operation makes it impossible to "avoid storing sensitive data on the phone".
This is no accident. When societies face the combination of nonfree software (both in OS and programs people are encouraged to install later), devices that are as close to always-on as is possible for mobile computing, and a userbase as persistently distracted away from focusing on their civil liberties as most tracker users are (no thanks to sites like /. which carry stories like these without any ethical critique to go alongside the corporate-written stockprice-sensitive spin) results like these are the outcome. Add to that the unethical ways in which trackers are made (such as Apple turning a blind eye to the environment in China or expoiting workers at Pegatron even worse than at Foxconn but Apple is certainly not alone in any of this) and you have an ugly recipe for abuse from end-to-end. Many thanks to people including Richard Stallman for compiling useful information about all of this and for his many years of warning people against nonfree software.
Digital Citizen
libertarians are all about personal property, until it conflicts with another of their interests (often big business, but not always).
it's a quick way to tell what they really want. there's no really fundamental libertarian reason to not protect personal data as property; it's just that the vogue in pop-libertarianism right now is to strip consumer rights in favor of tech companies. why? well, maybe because pop-libertarians are techies, and they want that shit.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
But it's China.
You know. The evil communists.
Well, ok, they're not communists any more. But they're still socialists, and that's almost as evil.
Of course the NSA is evil, too, but they're American, so they're ok. Rah, rah, rah, USA!
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
In fairness there's not a lot of US or European articles that don't include slants against those governments/corporations as well. The governments and corporations of the world seem to be rapidly sliding toward an invasive authoritarian dystopia. Great for big business and other power-mongers, but not so much for the rest of us. Are you really so surprised we give extra grief to those countries such as Russia and China who wear their fascism openly? We're not ranting against the *citizens* of those countries, we're ranting against their governments and corporations, just as we rant against our own. If you don't like it, go home and fix your country. And while you're at it share your techniques so we can do the same.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
I'm weeping just from the correct use of apostrophes in your post. Kudos, good sir.
Right. And all those people who showed information being uploaded are just paranoid people.
Uh, you have been following the news right, the ones where Blackberry voluntarily agrees to give whole sale all the information they have to governments like India, Saudi Arabia, etc?
You know, the phone where *ALL* your data have to pass through their data centers?
Especially funny is implying that it is Swiss product while it was in fact created by US-based company. Which means that NSA owns their asses and I expect that users buying phone *specifically* for security would be extra-juicy target. In short: honeypot.
Are you sending anonymous statistics? Or allowing auto-complete in the browser bar? All of these features rely on data being sent to Google's servers.
They snooped the phone out of the box to see what was sent. Have them try that again with a Galaxy S5 and iPhone5 and see the results.
Yes, new smartphones call home. The question of "does this do it more than anyone else?" wasn't answered.
Learn to love Alaska
Even if the operating system did support a hostname whitelist in application manifests, a whitelisted server could still proxy an application's requests. So one host controlled by the application publisher means all hosts.
libertarians are all about personal property, until it conflicts with another of their interests (often big business, but not always).
it's a quick way to tell what they really want. there's no really fundamental libertarian reason to not protect personal data as property; it's just that the vogue in pop-libertarianism right now is to strip consumer rights in favor of tech companies. why? well, maybe because pop-libertarians are techies, and they want that shit.
What I call the genuine form of libertarianism (small 'l') is about maximizing personal freedom, in the "life, liberty, and property" sense. The basic idea is that my right to swing my hand ends at the tip of your nose. Adult people should be able to do whatever they want that does not infringe on the rights of others, and then reap the consequences. For example: if you can manage to responsibly use any drugs you like, you should be able to; if you drive impaired because you refuse to do it responsibly, society has a legitimate reason to apprehend and punish you. Someone else who thinks drug use is always a horrible practice is free to practice that belief by not doing it themselves, but has no legitimate justification for persecuting a responsible user.
Privacy should be this way: your choice. I'm in favor of strong privacy protections in law because right now there is not much choice in the matter. If I want the Googles of the world to have my information, it should be because I knowingly, personally, actively, and deliberately gave it to them myself. Anything less is an infringement of my privacy rights. There is a clear intent behind burying such things in Page Y of a legalese EULA and that intent is to make it as difficult as possible to exercise this choice. A device that transfers my data to someone else on my behalf, by default, without my actively configuring it that way, shows the same intent.
There is a movement or an effort, more prominent and vocal the last several years, to deliberately misrepresent that all libertarian thought is the same thing as anarcho-capitalism. Observe carefully and you'll find that most any idea that, if popular, would threaten the status quo has multitudes of deceptive propaganda-technique-using PR efforts directed against it, the goal of which is to tarnish that idea in the popular mind. Most liberterian philosophies have a concept of inalienable human rights and include the desire for a government, the main purpose of which is to protect those rights. Regulation of business is necessary because otherwise, corporations will use their intense concentrations of wealth, market power, and political clout to infringe on the rights of individuals. This is legitimate and not some kind of control-freak idea or Puritannical fantasy of telling others how to live. Anyone who is against it and represents themselves as the only libertarians in existence (and not a particularly extreme form) is lying to you, it's as simple as that.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein