Lithuania’s Ministry of Defense advised consumers to avoid buying Chinese mobile phones and advised people to throw away the ones they have now after a government report found that the devices had built – in censorship features.
Flagship phones sold in Europe by China’s smartphone giant Xiaomi have a built-in ability to detect and censor terms such as “Free Tibet”, “Taiwan is living independence” or “democracy movement”, Lithuania’s state cyber security body said on Tuesday.
The feature in Xiaomi’s Mi 10T 5G phone software had been turned off for the “EU region”, but can be turned on remotely at any time, the Ministry of Defense’s National Cyber Security Center said in the report.
“Our recommendation is not to buy new Chinese phones and get rid of those already purchased as soon as reasonably possible,” Defense Minister Margiris Abukevicius told reporters as he introduced the report.
Xiaomi did not respond to a request for comment from Reuters.
Relations between Lithuania and China have become sour recently. China last month demanded that Lithuania withdraw its ambassador to Beijing and said it would withdraw its envoy to Vilnius after Taiwan announced that its mission in Lithuania would be called the Taiwan Representation Office.
Taiwanese missions in Europe and the United States use the name of the city of Taipei and avoid a reference to the island itself, which China claims as its own territory. US President Joe Biden’s National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan spoke with Lithuanian Prime Minister Ingrida Simonyte last week and underlined support for his country in the face of pressure from China.
The National Cyber Center report also said that the Xiaomi phone sent encrypted phone usage data to a server in Singapore. A security flaw was also found in the P40 5G phone by China’s Huawei, but no one was found in the phone from another Chinese manufacturer, OnePlus, it says. Huawei’s representative in the Baltics told the BNS news cable that its phones do not send the user’s data remotely.
The report said that the list of terms that could be censored by the Xiaomi phone’s system apps, including the default web browser, currently contains 449 terms in Chinese and is constantly being updated.
“This is important not only for Lithuania, but for all countries that use Xiaomi equipment,” the center said in the report.
News Source: Business Today
