Re: Not only
"claiming their private information would end up "in the hands" of China." It's already in the hands of China. And Russia, And the US. Hypocrisy appears to be rife in US rhetoric"
Indeed!
While doing a deep-dive inspection on an Android phone that was having repeated full-screen pop-up ads for a bogus "antivirus" app I discovered something much more nefarious.
It seems that the factory installed Facebook app was some customised version that was not found on the Play store.
The Facebook app was created specifically to allow the Chinese phone manufacturer and all the other built-in apps to access the users social media data and also use the apps extensive permission list by reflection.
I also found that the factory installed AVG "antivirus" app had an advertising SDK that could not only access the users clipboard but also the users camera, microphone and text-to-speech data.
Oh, and the bogus "antivirus" app that was "advertised" through fake virus warnings could access the users WhatsApp database by becoming a device administrator and abusing Androids accessibility API's.
I reported the developers to the Federal Trade Commission and to Google multiple times but nothing was ever done about it.
So yeah, it's kinda hard to point the finger at China for accessing users data when all the other app developers are also doing it and you have companies like Facebook and Google that allow low-level access to users data and our toothless federal government that refuses to put a stop to it.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
