Preinstalled malware on low-cost phones stealing data and money from poor people | Hacker News Reader

Preinstalled malware on low-cost phones stealing data and money from poor people

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46 pointspeter_retief23 comments

Premium brands aren't helping by normalising this, maybe not to the same degree but every Android experience seems to come with vendor botnet stuff built in.

Some slightly dystopian vibes in that first image.

Ever been to Nigeria? Outside the big cities, that is.

> called the idea of Chinese-made phones extracting data and money from people living in poverty “digital colonialism.”

How do I leave this timeline?

> blaming an unidentified “vendor in the supply chain process.”

I think at this stage it would be reasonable to assume it might be an Africa vendor. Would they not have some localisation? We can't jump to Chinese hate yet :(

One link in the article shows the problem also exists in phones sold in Brazil and Myanmar: https://www.upstreamsystems.com/pre-installed-malware-androi... . I'd look at the source.

I think the fact that these phones are Chinese-made is irrelevant, and calling this out in the title is linkbait that plays to our natural xenophobia. I would simply replace "Chinese-made" with "Cheap". I think that would better convey the most important point, that the reason these phones are cheap is that they're subsidized in a way that will ultimately be costly to their users.

Hear hear. iPhones are made in China too, are they doing the same thing?

(The snarky person would respond "not the exact same thing...").

I would hope that EU consumer protection laws are strong enough that this couldn't be done so easily in the EU without consequences to the seller. At the same time when it comes to international law, everything gets much harder to enforce.

I think the fact that they are Chinese made is completely relevant and I think your comment is bait that plays to people's desire not to be racist. There is a serious rot in the world as a result of the CCP - can we stop acting like fools and admit that is a fact and not some racist nonsense? No one says bashing Nazis is anti German. This is a regime that made meat patties out of the best of their youth and I am so sick of the apologist garbage I see on this website especially from Daniel Gackle.

Huh... the article says "Chinese", you're intrepreting this word as "CCP". Isn't this the same as saying "Germany killed Jews" when it's Nazis who were doing that?

If I was reading an article in 1944 that says "Germany kills Jews" I would not say the article is bullshit because it takes advantage of anti German xenophobia. I would say man a fucking genocide is happening in Germany, that nation is going to cause problems for the world.

> Isn't this the same as saying "Germany killed Jews" when it's Nazis who were doing that?

The setup is a false premise. It wasn't just the Nazis doing that. There was no clean line separation where only the Nazis were involved in the Jewish Holocaust. Historically such isolation of actors never really exists. Germany didn't kill six million Jews without the help of a large number of of non-Nazi Germans (their role in enabling the Nazis to power and conquest, supplying the Nazis, and in some cases direct assistance in the genocide; it was not uncommon for Germans to intentionally look the other way at what was going on, it was an open secret).

Presently China is the CCP, the CCP is China. They're inseparable as China is a one party dictatorship, and not subtly so. The CCP rules China top to bottom, in all aspects of culture and economy, without exception and without challenge. Their power is absolute over the nation. That said, I'm not implying it's reasonable to compare the current CCP China to Nazi Germany either.

> The CCP rules China top to bottom, in all aspects of culture and economy, without exception and without challenge. Their power is absolute over the nation.

Absolutist much? Have you ever even visited China? (I look forward to the response "Why would I visit such an evil dictatorship?".) A lot of the population of China are also just trying to get by.

I don't know if these scammers are independents, CCP members, sanctioned by CCP, or "rogue" members who would be punished if the higher-ups think the whole thing would make the country/the party look bad.

IMO the absolutism in your last paragraph is also how Al Qaeda justifies smashing planes into towers, equaling the controlling elite (and their actions in foreign countries) with the population, and saying "Killing the population is fair game.".

China's global production share was 68% in 2019, but it is losing ground to India.

https://www.counterpointresearch.com/chinas-smartphone-produ...

If the only cheap phones that steal are from China, then "Chines-made" qualifier is relevant.

Are any known similar situations where non-chinese phones are involved?

That's beside the point. The reason these phones do what they do isn't because they're Chinese-made; it's because they're advertised as cheap but there's a catch. The title distracts from the more important point and instead panders to our natural xenophobia, which is one of our greatest weaknesses. We should all be working to overcome that weakness, not stirring it up.

Hmm I see your point. My question should then have been: qui prodest?

They're cheap because China can afford to dump, which is a CCP strategy. All Chinese manufacturers are state-bound, and the article is not to blame if the CCP long term goal of erasing the citizen and conflating party, state, and country has been largely successful. It is absolutely relevant they're coming from China if no other manufacturing country is doing the same. It has nothing to do with race, but the insistence is telling.

How many phones on Earth are not Chinese? Is it even double digit percentages?

I have to second this. The problem described in the article is how cheap phones get exploited by malwares and apps that come preinstalled on them. This could be the reason why they become so cheap in the first place, both the manufacturers and distributors could have been collaborating with the app makers. I seriously doubt any brand would intentionally pre-install any money-stealing app to damage their long term business. Without looking into the details of the specific apps and how they got installed, using a title of obvious Sino-phobia and simply play the blame-China game like Donald Trump, is just lame and iresponsible.

Agreed. This article is only sensible if you would write the same title after reading the primary source.

> It’s the latest example of how cheap Chinese smartphones take advantage of the world’s poorest people. Current security concerns about Chinese apps and hardware have largely focused on potential back doors in Huawei’s 5G equipment. More recently, people have focused on how user data collected by TikTok could be abused by the company and the Chinese government. But an overlooked and ongoing threat is the consistent presence of malware on cheap smartphones from Chinese manufacturers and how it exacts a digital tax on people with low incomes.

I get a feeling the author wrote this conclusion before writing the article :)

It's a digital tax if the taxman collects the tax. So what is this tax?

Here's the primary source it's referencing: https://www.upstreamsystems.com/pre-installed-malware-androi...

> Systematic collection & transfer of their personal information to a 3rd country server without their consent.

> Depletion of their data allowance -a huge issue in emerging markets where the cost of data is dramatically high. In Brazil, for example, 1GB for prepaid subscribers costs the equivalent of 6h of work on minimum wage.

> Fraudulent transactions and charges to their prepaid airtime, the only way users can pay for digital services in emerging markets, as most people are unbanked. In Africa, 94% of the population has no account with a financial institution.

This might as well describe Yelp. How do we go from this to "Secretly Stealing Money From People Around The World"?

> Fraudulent transactions and charges to their prepaid airtime

I sure hope Yelp doesn't do that. In countries without sufficient traditional banking infrastructure, prepaid phone balances become a substitute to bank accounts. According to the Upstream Systems report you yourself linked, the malware wasn't just using the phone's data allowance, but actively attempting to subscribe to digital services which get billed to the user's prepaid balance. That's equivalent to signing up to services with the user's credit card.

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