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Chinese Mobile App Companies Are a National Security Risk, Says a Top Democrat (cnet.com)
Chinese mobile app companies pose the same national security risk to the US as telecom giants like Huawei and ZTE, Sen. Mark Warner said in an interview. From a report: Recent US legislation largely banned Huawei and ZTE from use by the government and its contractors, due to concerns about surveillance and other national security risks. Now Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, is signaling that Chinese app developers may face similar scrutiny from lawmakers, corporate America, and the intelligence community.
Warner's comments follow a recent BuzzFeed News report that popular apps from China's Cheetah Mobile and Kika Tech were exploiting user permissions to engage in a form of ad fraud. Eight Android apps with more than 2 billion total downloads were said to be engaging in a form of app-install ad fraud. Google subsequently removed two of the apps from the Play store and said it continues to investigate. Cheetah and Kika deny engaging in app-install fraud. "Under Chinese law, all Chinese companies are ultimately beholden to the Communist Party, not their board or shareholders, so any Chinese technology company -- whether in telecom or mobile apps -- should be seen as extensions of the state and a national security risk," Warner said in an interview this week with BuzzFeed News. Further reading: Sen. Warner calls for US cyber doctrine, new standards for security.
Warner's comments follow a recent BuzzFeed News report that popular apps from China's Cheetah Mobile and Kika Tech were exploiting user permissions to engage in a form of ad fraud. Eight Android apps with more than 2 billion total downloads were said to be engaging in a form of app-install ad fraud. Google subsequently removed two of the apps from the Play store and said it continues to investigate. Cheetah and Kika deny engaging in app-install fraud. "Under Chinese law, all Chinese companies are ultimately beholden to the Communist Party, not their board or shareholders, so any Chinese technology company -- whether in telecom or mobile apps -- should be seen as extensions of the state and a national security risk," Warner said in an interview this week with BuzzFeed News. Further reading: Sen. Warner calls for US cyber doctrine, new standards for security.
More generally, all unaudited software that you run poses a security risk. And all proprietary software is unauditable.
If your computers have access to anything important (an example of something important would be .. oh, I don't know .. THE USER HIMSELF) then you shouldn't be running any proprietary software, since there is 0% chance that you know what it does. And you shouldn't be surprised if it does something hostile, since the entire reason it's proprietary is that its maker wanted the software to serve them, instead of you.
Stop buying Chinese-government state-owned products. Even a retard like Trump isn't entirely wrong about resisting them, feckless and ineffective and blustering and STUPID as he is.
How do we know that the Chinese have not put some machine/hardware level malware in the Apple phones electronics ?
Was Facebook/Twitter not a state/national security risk come election time?
Lots of people (including myself) spend a lot of time with all iPhone networking traffic going through web proxies. We'd especially notice some odd connections going off to China...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Is the National Security Risk for (Pick Your Nation).
Maybe when politicians realize that, and start pressuring companies to produce hardware that is end-user or institution controlled and managed, we will finally have some real security that will be immune to the threat of 'chinese mobile apps' or any other corporate apps (like microsoft, facebook, google, yandex, apple (even if they claim otherwise), etc. All of whom have the same or even more invasive levels of access to personal data, before handing over backdoors to foreign or domestic government agencies.)
If they were really concerned about security they would take a stand, even if unpopular, to ensure control and rights remain in the hands of the end users or organization in the case of institution issued devices. Doing otherwise is neglectful, ignorant, and/or outright malicious.
Pure racism. Why single out the Chinese when, for example, Facebook does it? There need to be universal standards, not singling out a single ethnic group in the current trade war with East Asia.
“We have a long way to go on cyber hygiene and online media consumption habits,” Sen. Mark Warner.
That sound like phrase the you only will hear from a Chinese official. But not is an U.S. Senator. LOL.
THERE WILL BE CONSEQUENCES FOR YOUR LIES NAZI FAGGOT KEN DOLL
Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING. Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
Pure racism. Why single out the Chinese when, for example, Facebook does it?
Because Facebook merely wants to sell you ads. China actually is an authoritarian dictatorship.
It's easy enough to blur the two together, but really, it's false equivalency.
Only an idiot downloads without checking more about the source. Sadly, many do it.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Your mobile browser typically doesn't have the excessive permissions an app has.
Your browser isn't going to access your mic, camera, contacts, storage, etc.
Too many instances where apps have been caught hoovering up data they have no business even having access to.
The more apps you use, the less secure your data is.
Is this any different than what many, if not all, social networks that earn profit through advertising do with your data? Some are pretty tricky about it, too. Look at the 10 million euro fine by an Italian agency against Face Book for making it difficult to figure out where your data goes. And what are the US three letter agencies doing with your data? Much of this hand wringing about data interception is highly hypocritical.
current attitudes in Washington are making adversaries / enemies out of nations that might have been just as happy to co-operate economically.
This applies to China in particular. It's probably mostly paranoid, xenophobia and racism driving it.
Thanks for re-starting the cold-war, dufuses.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
It's unhygienic.
As is excessive Pr0n consumption.
Speaking of which, I think a good explanation for Trump's insane pottymouth tweet-stream is his dumbphone (specially altered smartphone) has been hacked, via a mobile porn site, by the Chinese, and they have a war-room staffed by their greatest state-loyal comedians, carefully crafting Trump's every tweet.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
If a republican said this then, and only then, should it be a consideration. You know if a republican says something is bad, it is bad, for real bad. I await my party's signal to torch the chinese apps and upon getting said signal, I shall do it to it.
Huawei are ahead of the game, getting ready for the Aussie market. No security risks here.
Buying paid reviews is common. And it's blatantly obvious, e.g., when one of my apps gets a review with a comment, it tends to be a sentence or two in length; most of the competitive apps in my space have pages of three-word, five star reviews, clustered together. Google does not appear to care. Most tend to be from a single particular country.
It's also worth noting that using the Google Play Store is NOT ALLOWED in China. So when you're a developer there doing this kind of stuff, you're 100% guaranteed not to be committing fraud against your own country's citizens.
Many developers also use a "whack-of-mole" strategy, distributing basically the same app by multiple "companies". In the unlikely event one actually gets taken down, the effect is negligible.
So it's litigation proof. The reviews look great. The apps are pretty enough. Google doesn't care. Users never seem to wonder how the company is actually going to make money on something that appears "entirely free".
My genuine competitors and myself are being destroyed by this. The overall quality of the *average* user's smartphone experience is worse today than it ever has been as a result. I believe this problem is a key factor in why we're seeing the momentum of the smartphone market collapse.
"Chinese mobile app companies are saying national security risk are top democrats."
Not very credible, but - more credible than statements by US lawmakers, that's for sure.
Nothing. Nothing at all. For that matter what would stop an actual US citizen from doing the same thing for fun or for profit? Again, it's fucking nothing.
Is there a top or not website? I want to vote too!
to any other nation than US.
And maybe even to US.
Currency manipulation? 30 year economic war? Lay off the crack pipe gramps.
Trust American to not have backdoors !! LOL
You pathetic cocksucker of corporate America.
Filter error: You can type more than that for your comment.
Ask the Eastern European
I asked him. He said he wasn't sure, and to ask one of the other 10's of millions of them.
Coming from you thats got to be a joke. You have built a reputation upon not checking the sources and denying facts you don't like.
Go troll elsewhere WindBourne.
Oh wait they did exactly that...
Go peddle your lies and trolls elsewhere WindBourne.
If we don't trust Chinese companies and they don't trust ours, is there some independent, trusted source that can or will validate software and or hardware? Somehow this seems like a pretty slippery slope ...
Pointing fingers to others while you yourself are much better at it.... The US shouldn't be such hypocrites as rhey do it themselves much worse to other countries and to their own citizens...
With a proper security model, suspect Android downloads could be sandboxed with permissions to do SFA, and all the IP endpoints it initiates could be thoroughly logged.
more Windy lies