I’ve been needing to buy a new phone and while I’m here in china I’ve seen some really intriguing options only available here.
obviously the telemetry is extremely problematic, more so than non chinese phones, is it feasible to try remove with adb or the universal debloater? since there is custom rom support at all? or should I just forget about it?
With Chinese phones, we have no real way of knowing where the spyware is. It may may be baked into the main OS, the added apps or other. Your safest bet would be a new ROM. ADB requires knowing which apps to pull out and unless someone has identified them, you’ll largely be guessing. Debloater will only remove what it knows about, so better than nothing. Whatever you do, I’d suggest something like RethinkDNS, or Netguard. These type of apps can go a great job of locking down anything that tries to connect to the outside world. It’s easier than it sounds, you simply select and allow at all the apps that you want to have connection.
Summary New ROM or ADB or Debloater plus, RethinkDNS or Netguard or similar.
Or in the hardware, like the baseband processor or even something more obscure. Replacing the OS won’t help with that.
In Huawei at least, you don’t have the ability to install a custom ROM. They don’t allow you to unlock the bootloader.
And what’s the situation with non-Chinese phones? Given the Snowden revelations and our understanding of US military intelligence projects for the last 50+ years, I would say every phone is likely irredeemably compromised. Just look at what the US did with Siemens phones and literally every embassy in the world.
Precisely this. The fuss about Chinese telecom hardware spying on you is made up by US intelligence because they want to be the ones who get to spy on you and keep their back doors in your products
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