31–40 of 47 posts
Can anyone recommend a similar company that isn't violating privacy?
Can anyone recommend a similar company that isn't violating privacy?
OnePlus isn't all that special in the hardware category. Buy any device supported by Lineage OS and go nuts. If you want the whole package from a single company keep your eye on the Librem 5 https://puri.sm/shop/librem-5/
I don't know about that. I've found their hardware to offer surprisingly good value for money, and they offer close-to-stock Android for much less than Google now do.
Their privacy failures are deeply unfortunate; I'd have remained a happy customer for the next several years were it not for these issues.
Why does it matter whether the company is Chinese or not? Isn't it bad enough that there's a background process running, unbeknownst to the user, and presumably uncontrollable by the user, that monitors the device's clipboard and has methods like containsBankAccount(String)?
Because China's government has been known to lean on manufacturers in the past to include malware and backdoors.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure it's bad but there are a couple of reasons why it matters that it's a Chinese company. 1. It feeds into the suspicion many have that many (most? all?) large Chinese companies are effectively controlled by the Chinese government. This could go as far as having backdoors in, say, Huawei routing equipment. 2. Effectively disclosing a user's personal information to the Chinese government could, in some cases, imperi…
>It feeds into the suspicion many have that many (most? all?) large Chinese companies are effectively controlled by the Chinese government. All is the correct answer. Just like it's not legal to own property in China, all companies are ultimately owned and controlled by the Chinese government. They have shiny, pretty, Western-looking front ends to attract foreign investment, but from a strictly legal standpoint, they…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Property_Law_of_the_People's_R...
It's not accurate to say China is "still a communist country." It could be more closely defined as a capitalist one-party state. That one party is the CCP, and they still revere Mao, but it's an open secret that they have embraced capitalism under a veneer of socialist populism.
That being said, it's not wrong to say that information in the hands of a Chinese company is a trivial step away from being information in the hands of the Chinese state.
On one hand, if you live in the USA maybe it's better that a Chinese company spies on you, because they're far away and the government/other gangsters are less likely to care about you than about local people involved in local politics etc. On the other hand, there's no guarantee your data isn't also made available to domestic parties, either as it's intercepted in transit or explicitly shared in bulk in exchange for…
> On one hand, if you live in the USA maybe it's better that a Chinese company spies on you It depends on who the "you" is. If it's a couple of internet nobodies like you and me that China is spying on, then it's no big whoop. But if the "you" in question is someone who works at the Pentagon, or at a defense contractor, or a diplomat, or government official, then there's a problem.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That sounds nice in theory, but in a global setting, how will it really work? Per GP comment, there is a whole tech stack of N providers, each piece made or running in a different country, pushing data to servers in another country, which data is bought by interests in a third country, for M destinations. Then you get the providers who intentionally don't store data in GDPR countries specifically so they can avoid th…
The GDPR applies extraterritorially. If a company even stores a record of a single EU citizen, the GDPR applies to it, and the EU has the right to seize the assets of the company for the purpose of enforcing it.
If you were to only offer your service in North America, but someone from the EU comes over to North America on vacation, and somehow becomes recorded in your service.
Does the GDPR still apply in this case?
Also worth noting iPhone sends a lot of information in the HTTP headers about your phone - like model number. Android does the same thing. Also simply plugging your phone in to USB (not accepting any on-screen dialogs) will save the IEMI and other device IDs into your system log. If you ever have a device stolen I suggest you run $(zgrep -i iphone /var/log/*.gz)
And what penalty will the company suffer? Virtually none.
This is one of the cases where they will probably suffer if any of this turns out to be true. OnePlus is a small manufacturer with a following of enthusiasts. They aren't large or popular enough to PR their way out of this.