Xiaomi smartphones/Đức Trịnh
The German Federal Service for Supervision of Cybersecurity BSI conducted an investigation after the call of the Lithuanian authorities to get rid of Xiaomi smartphones. The latter were allegedly seen in censorship.
The verdict was finally announced: BSI was unable to detect any anomalies requiring further investigation or other action. Thus, the experts did not find evidence of any censorship tools in the software code of Xiaomi devices.
What is known
In September last year, Lithuanian officials filed charges against Xiaomi, saying that its smartphones have a built-in censorship tool that filters out requests that are objectionable or inconvenient for Beijing.
Among the censored phrases:
- Free Tibet,
- Long live Taiwan independence,
- Movement for Democracy and others.
In addition, the Lithuanian authorities also stated that that the company’s devices send user data to servers in Singapore.
For its part, Xiaomi stated that devices available in Europe and on the global market do not have any tools for censorship, and also assured that it guards the privacy of users’ personal data.
Not so long ago, the Taiwan National Communications Commission (NCC) also announced the discovery of built-in censorship tools in Xiaomi smartphones. According to Taiwanese experts, the MiAdBlacklisConfigur program is available on globalapi.ad.xiaomi.com servers for Xiaomi smartphones using seven standard applications. The purpose of this program is to censor requests and block links to sites that Beijing does not like. For example, blocking occurs on requests with the words “Taiwan independence”, “liberate Tibet”, “events in Tiananmen Square”.
If you are interested in learning about the history of mobile phones in Ukraine, we suggest you look video.
How Ukrainians became mobile: watch the video