Nokia devices being investigated for sending user data to China

Privacy is a big deal and it is also one of the reasons why the US government is encouraging its allies to drop Huawei’s equipment from their infrastructure, citing both privacy and security reasons over fears that Huawei could potentially act as a spy on behalf of China.

Unfortunately, it appears that Huawei might not be the only brand we need to worry about. According to a report from Norwegian publication NRK, it appears that certain Nokia 7 Plus handsets in Europe have been discovered to be sending detailed user data and information back to China. This includes information such as GPS, phone numbers, and device serial numbers.

Upon further investigation, it was found that the servers that the data was being sent back to is owned by China Telecom, the country’s state-owned telecoms company. It has been speculated that these devices that were sending data back to China might have been an accident on HMD Global’s end, where the affected units could have actually been intended for China but somehow made their way to Europe.

The company has since confirmed that this data sharing issue has only affected a “single batch” of Nokia 7 Plus devices and that the offending application has been removed from the affected units. That being said, HMD is not off the hook just yet as the Finnish data protection body has confirmed that they will be investigating the matter themselves and will see if this might have breached GDPR data protection laws.

Source: NRK (via 9to5Google)