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Comment by majia | Hacker News Reader

Not surprising, it's a phone model for Chinese market. The "evil services" are the Chinese equivalents of Google Maps, Google Analytics, Google Search, FB messenger, and iCloud/Samsung cloud.

The real issue is that most phone makers have tons of unnecessary services pre-installed in their phones, such as social media login, location tracking, and cloud storage. It would be better to design/license Android OS in a way that gives user complete control on what is pre-installed.

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Yep. That's exactly it. Those unnecessary service calls are more likely to be Google-esque services for event tracking and user analytics than spying like U.S has portraited. In the old days when carriers released major smartphones, those will be the equivalent of bloatwares and their supporting services. If the guy examines Samsung Galaxy phones, it would almost be the same. The only difference is probably that TLS adoption are VERY LOW in Chinese market (Surprised? Not for a surveillance heavy society!), hence their services aren't using https as much as it should.

I think the comments on HN are missing the point his tweets are making, noticeably that Huawei phones are:

(a) Sending info over plain HTTP to non-secure sites based in China

(b) Sending all your browser and other online activity to a site called track.uc.cn

> The only difference is probably that TLS adoption are VERY LOW in Chinese market (Surprised? Not for a surveillance heavy society!), hence their services aren't using https as much as it should

I thought that the government has its fingers in all the tech companies so whether the data are encrypted or not doesn't matter?

Are you referring to the hardware attack against SuperMicro? If so, it's a pretty big leap to make from "we know about a single attack" to "fingers in all tech companies." Not that I trust Google and friends, but... that's a pretty big claim.

I am not, and in fact it seems just as likely that the supermicro endeavor was a private endeavor. It does seem likely, though, given the level of trust the government has in its companies, e.g. I think it was tencent that made their social credit system.

> If the guy examines Samsung Galaxy phones, it would almost be the same.

This is just guessing. If I have to bet, I'd as well bet that Google/Samsung/ISPs/Everyone is spying on you, but just guessing and shrugging it off is not helping.

We should be inspired to check even more devices and inform users about backdoor traffic.

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