DJI is fully compliant with China's policy of civil-military fusion. Anyone flying anywhere sensitive should not use them. They're beaming back home whatever they want, and China is using both tech and data to give an asymmetric advantage to allies like Russia in the Ukraine war.
Both fronts use DJI drones[0][1], although DJI suspended its activities in both Russia and Ukraine as of April 26, 2022[2] and contractually forbids[3] any sales by dealers to either country and for combat use.
However, other actors are entering the war business, like Parrot[4].
They still use mostly DJI drones by burning an older firmware and using an anonymizer to hide takeoff and pilot's position from a potential aeroscope. DJI's are pretty cheap and really good at what they are doing.
They're cloud based, aren't they? So regardless of what they're doing with the data, it's true that they're (figuratively) beaming it back, although parent is admittedly implying more.
I accept that chinese authorities generally have access to anything they want to in the country, so I would buy that they have access to drone data.
They're not cloud based as far as I would define it. I have one and fly mostly on areas where there is no internet signal. The drone beams back video to your phone and unless you're syncing the cache videos with their cloud nothing its stored other than flight meta data. You can avoid even that by using a totally offline controller/phone.
Given the history of China and its tech companies, the burden of proof shifted to their shoulders.
So, I turn to them: is there anything that proves its a surveillance-free device? No, they cannot assure that.
Someone may not like it, but China now has a very, very bad reputation among people in the West. Especially after the last pandemic and how they handled it.
Horse shit. If you can’t show specific data traffic flowing from Mavic software back to China that could conceivably be drone footage, this claim is bogus and borderline libelous.
It would be trivial to prove this to be true, and there is zero of that proof. Hell, at this point it would be valuable to even see small phone homes by Mavic software from the last year, but I doubt you even have that.
There are plenty of other reasons not to buy this drone, so the lies are completely uncalled for.
Surveillance doesn't always run 24/7 for every device. The signal/noise ratio would be extremely low.
To keep a high ratio, it's selectively switched on for high interest targets.
There's no reason for a drone flying on my backyard to send any data to China. Their privacy protection is inexistent. You can ask it to be conceivably whatever horse shit you like, I don't care. I don't want any bytes sent there.
Nothing simplistic about asking for evidence that this is occurring. Yes it’s not easy, but without evidence you’re spewing speculation, and when you claim speculation as certainty it ventures into the realm of bull shit.
Where? Maybe in the west, certainly not in the rest of the world. China didn't start a war that killed 1million people not even 20 years ago. Westerners don't care about that but that's to be expected.
The thing is: a lot of people want to live in the US. That's not true for China.
Have you ever been to China and the US?
You may think they're equally awful, but a LOT of people disagree.
China's reputation is in really bad shape among people in the West. Despite also being under surveillance, that's why many prefer American or European tech.
Not saying it's all of it, but could some of this reputation be from propaganda and attempts to smear chinese tech? Seems like a pretty common MO from the USA
You can turn off all the phone radios or you can block all network traffic and the app still works fine. You only need a connection to get an unlock code in certain airspace.
What concrete claim are you looking for? Is it not enough that Huawei was banned by the US? Do you know the reason why it was banned? The same reason could broadly apply to every Chinese company. TikTok is the software counterpart that isn’t allowed on any government phone.
DJI does not produce infrastructure pieces so it hasn’t reached the same urgency to the US, so it’s still allowed.
> Is it not enough that Huawei was banned by the US?
They are in an economic war and are competing about whose spyware people use. I dont see how given that you can take this as a sensible metric.
Not arguing against your main point though, your line of reasoning is just flawed. The US would have reason to behave like this even if Chinese spyware wasnt a threat.
For the infrastructure, for legit strategic reasons (without even considering they are abusing it, you generally don't want to rely on foreign infrastructure on your territory).
For the smartphones, that's pure commercial war. Huawei was a big competitor.
You can operate the drones without a connected device. Operator location is done by locating the radio source. It would be better to have repeaters and cable transmitter to them to avoid direct strike.
Tech people are usually paranoid by the most unlikely scenarios. A soldier with an antenna can pinpoint the operator location much easier than trying to get this kind of info from china without leaks.
Its not impossible that DJI could have failsafe phone home systems in there that'll still send info back home after rooting. My guess is that the products they produced before the Ukraine war were more naive and now that they've learnt consumer drones will be used in warzones no matter what, I'll bet they have started incorporating such failsafes. Imagine being able to know where every mavic in the frontlines are and selling that info to the Russians.
iOS does not allow sideloading. Android does. That would be enough difference. You can still enforce app permissions on apps outside the store on Android, like location and cameras etc only when using the app and so on.
Of course there is no smoking gun but you'd have to be dumb to believe it's not happening. Apple want to make phones in China and sell phones to China Wechat (China) is allowed a free pass on the app store.
Honestly if I was as large as DJI I would avoid publishing in the play (and Apple app if it were possible) store as well and save the wasted time of the constant pointless review rejections.
That's not incompatible. They do a lot for security, even if malware still manages to get there. One would assume that the most popular apps get more attention.
The APK is a thin shell that downloads even more code to execute, from the internet. So, what you download and inspect isn't what's executed, and what you execute now might be different in 5 minutes.