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Some Low-Cost Android Phones Come at a Price -- Your Privacy (cnet.com)
Cheap phones are coming at the price of your privacy, security analysts discovered. From a report: At $60, the BLU R1 HD is the top-selling phone on Amazon. Last November, researchers caught it secretly sending private data to China. Shanghai Adups Technology, the group behind the spying software on the BLU R1 HD, called it a mistake. But analysts at Kryptowire found the software provider is still making the same "mistake" on other phones. At the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas on Wednesday, researchers from Kryptowire, a security firm, revealed that Adups' software is still sending a device's data to the company's server in Shanghai without alerting people. But now, it's being more secretive about it. "They replaced them with nicer versions," Ryan Johnson, a research engineer and co-founder at Kryptowire, said. "I have captured the network traffic of them using the Command and Control channel when they did it." An Adups spokeswoman said that it had resolved the issues in 2016 and that the issues "are not existing anymore." Kryptowire said it has observed the company sending data without telling users on at least three different phones.
Don't come with spyware.
The real purchasing decision should be which phones allow rooting without blowing an efuse or disabled marketed functionality.
If you can unlock the phone via usb and adb and maybe a password and it doesn't do anything funny, it is a good phone. Everything else should be treated as suspect.
If you want privacy, you have to be willing to pay for it. Most people want free. Free Facebook, Free Google, Free videos, Free Free Free.
You are the product if you think you are getting something for free.
Yet if I were to say 'my iPhone doesn't do this because I pay a boatload of money for it' people get all bent because Apple.
Yet Apple doesn't have this kind of problem and Android phones do.
Free: you just got what you paid for.
Free: you just got what you paid for.
Unfortunately you can't necessarily trust non-free products either. Not even expensive ones.