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Lithuania says throw away Chinese phones due to censorship concerns

reuters.com

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Re: Lithuania says throw away Chinese phones due to censorship concerns

#2
I think you would have to be mad to leave the stock ROM running on a Xiaomi phone, IIRC they were caught logging peoples browser history a few years ago. Several models have mainline LineageOS support, I'm running Lineage on my Mix 2S and hope to have years worth of updates going forward. The hardware is really good value as long as you install an non-tainted OS.

Re: Lithuania says throw away Chinese phones due to censorship concerns

#3

I think you would have to be mad to leave the stock ROM running on a Xiaomi phone, IIRC they were caught logging peoples browser history a few years ago. Several models have mainline LineageOS support, I'm running Lineage on my Mix 2S and hope to have years worth of updates going forward. The hardware is really good value as long as you install an non-tainted OS.

What about Android One?

Re: Lithuania says throw away Chinese phones due to censorship concerns

#4
What difference does it make to disable the censorship function compared to fully removing it from the code base?

Considering that phone updates cannot be verified, every phone maker has the ability to secretly add such features at any time. And if the phone is link to a user account they could even do this in a targeted way.

Re: Lithuania says throw away Chinese phones due to censorship concerns

#5

I think you would have to be mad to leave the stock ROM running on a Xiaomi phone, IIRC they were caught logging peoples browser history a few years ago. Several models have mainline LineageOS support, I'm running Lineage on my Mix 2S and hope to have years worth of updates going forward. The hardware is really good value as long as you install an non-tainted OS.

Not to sound paranoid, but won't even LinageOS phones have to run closed-sourced firmware and drivers?

Re: Lithuania says throw away Chinese phones due to censorship concerns

#6

I think you would have to be mad to leave the stock ROM running on a Xiaomi phone, IIRC they were caught logging peoples browser history a few years ago. Several models have mainline LineageOS support, I'm running Lineage on my Mix 2S and hope to have years worth of updates going forward. The hardware is really good value as long as you install an non-tainted OS.

You can replace the user-facing software, but can/would you trust the baseband?

Re: Lithuania says throw away Chinese phones due to censorship concerns

#7
post #3

I think you would have to be mad to leave the stock ROM running on a Xiaomi phone, IIRC they were caught logging peoples browser history a few years ago. Several models have mainline LineageOS support, I'm running Lineage on my Mix 2S and hope to have years worth of updates going forward. The hardware is really good value as long as you install an non-tainted OS.

What about Android One?

I believe Xiaomi left the Android One program last year.

Re: Lithuania says throw away Chinese phones due to censorship concerns

#8
post #5

I think you would have to be mad to leave the stock ROM running on a Xiaomi phone, IIRC they were caught logging peoples browser history a few years ago. Several models have mainline LineageOS support, I'm running Lineage on my Mix 2S and hope to have years worth of updates going forward. The hardware is really good value as long as you install an non-tainted OS.

Not to sound paranoid, but won't even LinageOS phones have to run closed-sourced firmware and drivers?

Correct, its entirely possible they could be doing more insidious stuff at the firmware level, but dumb keyword checking is almost certainly implemented in userspace.

I don't think you can trust any proprietary firmware out there, its just a question of which you trust less than the others.

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