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by throthaway 3504 days ago
Unless you've purchased phones from all the "more established" brands and verified whether they're sending data, this is hardly sound advice.

"More established" brands have a history of leaving secret backdoors and phoning home just the same as the Chinese devices.

One was discovered in a range of Samsung devices just a couple years ago. Lenovo, same story, spyware and garbage hidden deep within their gadgets.

The only solution is to take a chance, buy a device, test it. If it's backdoored, return it if you can, and call them out on HN/Amazon reviews, etc.
1 comments
paradite 3504 days ago
That seems rather pessimistic. If you really don't trust any brands, what's wrong with directly buying from the tech companies instead of the manufacturers? Like Google Nexus (Pixel), Microsoft Windows Phone and iPhone. They are supposed to the industrial standards for how to do privacy correctly.
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YUPampessimist 3504 days ago
When a simple Google search reveals the exact pattern mentioned occurring again and again, not just with phones but with networking gear, laptops, TV's, IoT devices, CDs (Sony rootkit anyone?), and websites loaded to the max with trackers and secret downloads onto people's machines, it moves from pessimism to "this is just how it works."

The price of freedom is eternal vigilance. You want crap free gadgets, make them sell crap free gadgets by ratting them out when they sell gadgets loaded with crap.

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paradite 3504 days ago
I am okay with the skepticism you have here but is there really a reason to create two throwaway accounts just to reply to me?

Do you happen to know me in real life? I can't think of another reason for this.

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a3n 3504 days ago
No one should have to justify wanting to remain private/anonymous.
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hackuser 3504 days ago
What standards are you talking about? I don't know of any. AFAIK, the standard is to monitor users and collect as much data on them as possible. The whole Internet runs on that model.
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codedokode 3504 days ago
The market could be driving that. If you don't spy on a user then your competitor would do and get ahead of you (and get additional profit from selling the data or showing relevant advertisement).

Microsoft didn't have any telemetry in earlier days. Now they turned to a dark side.

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