Last September, Lithuanian government officials filed an official complaint and accusations against Xiaomi. They’ve said that its devices have a built-in sensor that filters out requests that are objectionable or inconvenient for the Chinese regime. Among other things, they proved that the devices send personal user data to servers in Singapore. Xiaomi ignored the accusations and stated that devices available in Europe and the global market do not have any tools for censorship and that they keep the standards over confidentiality and privacy.
SPYING TOOLS IN XIAOMI SMARTPHONES? EXPERTS ANSWER
The German federal cybersecurity watchdog BSI conducted its own investigation and delivered its verdict. Experts didn’t find any evidence regarding the presence of tools for censorship; in the program code of Xiaomi devices.
This suggests that the experts did not find any evidence of the accusations of Lithuanian officials against Xiaomi.
However, not so long ago, the Taiwan National Communications Commission (NCC) announced that they’ve discovered a built-in sensor in Xiaomi devices. It might be that China considers Taiwan to be its province, which means that no one removes the tools for censoring from devices sold on the territory of China.
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According to Taiwanese experts, the MiAdBlacklisConfigur program is available in the globalapi.ad.xiaomi.com servers to Xiaomi smartphones using seven standard applications. These apps are tasked to censor requests and block links to the site that the Chinese authorities dislike. A good example of this will be search terms as: “Taiwan independence”, “free Tibet”, “Tiananmen Square events” and many other requests.
“Our test showed that a program [MiAdBlacklisConfigur] can be downloaded from the servers of globalapi.ad.xiaomi.com through seven built-in applications on the Mi 10T 5G smartphone, which targets a long list of politically sensitive terms and can block the smartphones from linking to related Web sites. These apps can also transmit users’ Web history to servers in Beijing,” the NCC said in a statement.
“Judging from the test results; we will continue our investigations to determine if Xiaomi Taiwan has compromised the interests of Taiwanese users; by invading their privacy. We will inform relevant agencies if the company contravenes regulations enforced by other administrative authorities;” the National Communications Commission (NCC) of Taiwan said.
