HMD Global, the Finnish company that sublicensed the Nokia smartphone brand from Microsoft, is under investigation in Finland for collecting and sending some phone owners’ information to a server located in China.
In a statement to Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat, the company blamed the data collection on a coding mistake during which an “activation package” was accidentally included in some phones’ firmware.
HMD Global said that only a single batch of Nokia 7 Plus devices were impacted and included this package.
Why does stuff like this keep happening? It seems like such a simple thing to not preinstall dodgy stuff on factory-set smartphones.
Hm? MS, not Nokia, still gets money from HMD using the brand Nokia?
I suppose firmwares of phones in development are littered with “activation packages” and such …to the point that it might be hard for devs to remember about completely backtracking to a clean state.
Yeah, that’s usually what happens when you sell something. Do you still collect rent on a house you sold years ago?
Well I was simply under the impression that MS rights to Nokia brand was only for a few years / that it passed… / hence “still” in my post.
Thom,
You’d think so, but this was done at the behest of the Chinese government. China doesn’t allow a phone to be sold in its country without reporting the SIM number, phone serial number, and location to the government-run telecom every time the screen is turned on. HMD Global (and OnePlus) “forgot” to turn this function off for phones sold outside of China.
https://www.androidcentral.com/how-does-company-nokia-or-oneplus-mistakenly-collect-user-data-and-ship-it-server-china
This issue has affected phones resold by BLU in the US in the past as well. Nearly every BLU phone is a rebranded China-first model and at one point they all were reporting this info back to a server in China. Unlike HMD and OnePlus, BLU was slow to issue an update and apology, and several phone models never got the fix.
At some point we’re going to have to cut the undersea fiber enabling China to spread its bullshit over the Internet.
Keeping ties with China / being able to manufacture goods there is too important for our corporate overlords… (and the Chinese aren’t alone with stuff like this; some other countries would also need to be quarantined for things like ECHELON or Snowden revelations; also won’t happen…)