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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.
How do we know that the Chinese have not put some machine/hardware level malware in the Apple phones electronics ?
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.
Even a retard like Trump isn't entirely wrong about resisting them...
Right?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
We have always been at war with Eastasia.
He can be right and a hypocrite at the same time.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Is this really about an ethnic group or is it about one big government versus another big government? I like to think that superpower politics are more subtle than race.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
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.
China is a very high risk, as is anything by Russia, or their allies.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
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?
Govt vs govt. Any major Chinese company is govt controlled. To think otherwise is ignorant and foolish.
The message sent? Words have no meaning.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
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.
Agreed. Proper wording: Mobile apps are a risk.
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.
to any other nation than US.
And maybe even to US.
It's not racist if it's true
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.