Huawei phones are flagging Google apps as Trojan malware, saying that the app was detected sending SMS privately, enticing users to pay with adult content, downloading/installing apps privately, or stealing private information, which may cause property damage and privacy leakage.

I’m seeing a lot of reports from users of Huawei and Honor devices have reported that their phones are incorrectly identifying Google apps as Trojan malware, specifically labeled as TrojanSMS-PA. According to the alert, this “malicious software” has the ability to send SMS messages without user consent.

  • Ordoabchao
    68•8 months ago

    I’d trust a Huawei phone less than I would a Google phone. Much less.

    • @[email protected]English
      17•8 months ago

      Hands down the worst phone I’ve had was the Nexus 6P. The battery issues were incredibly bad, to the point there was a successful class action lawsuit about it.

      Since that was a Google phone manufactured by Huawei, I have no idea how that contributes to this conversation but it seemed relevant. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

      • @[email protected]English
        1•8 months ago

        That thing was a POS. Thankfully Google gave me a Pixel XL with double the storage on the house because of it, but I also in hindsight worry that my personal data was being backdoored to Beijing. 10 years ago me should have been wiser to not buy a Chinese company’s phone.

      • RedjardEnglish
        31•8 months ago

        Huawei Smartphones collect a lot of data from their users and send it to Huawei[1], and the founder of Huawei has very strong relations to the Chinese government[2].

        [1] https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0279942 “On the data privacy practices of Android OEMs”
        [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren_Zhengfei “Ren Zhengfei […] is the founder and CEO of Huawei Technologies […]. He is a member of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).”

        A company being employee owned is a very good sign, but mainly for worker treatment. Huawei is still not managed by all of its employees; a few people in upper management are tasked to represent the owners interest, and in that process, as per usual, morals get diluted.

        You can see this by the facts that Huawei phones still violate user privacy by collecting copious amounts of data on them, or that Huawei knowingly supplies surveillance equipment to the CCP, that is used in areas where a lot of Uyghurs live and in the not-concentration-camps that reeducate Uyghurs .

        Besides that, I also just came across “Huawei states it is an employee-owned company, but this remains a point of dispute” on their wikipedia article, which at a cursory look appears to have some good points against that statement behind it.
        The paper about that is here https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3372669

        In summary, we find the following:

        • The Huawei operating company is 100% owned by a holding company, which is in turn approximately 1% owned by Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei and 99% owned by an entity called a “trade union committee” for the holding company.

        • We know nothing about the internal governance procedures of the trade union committee. We do not know who the committee members or other trade union leaders are, or how they are selected.

        • Trade union members have no right to assets held by a trade union.

        • What have been called “employee shares” in “Huawei” are in fact at most contractual interests in a profit-sharing scheme.

        • Given the public nature of trade unions in China, if the ownership stake of the trade union committee is genuine, and if the trade union and its committee function as trade unions generally function in China, then Huawei may be deemed effectively state-owned.

        • Regardless of who, in a practical sense, owns and controls Huawei, it is clear that the employees do not.

        So at every path we come to the same conclusion, the CCP will get your data, and about as much of it as google (and probably the US government) if you used their operating system and services.

        Huawei is about as trustworthy as your average trillion dollar corporation, and about as devious with their whitewashing as all others too. Google is masquerading as pro-privacy, apple as pro-repair and pro-environment, and Huawei as pro-worker and state-independent, because they all aren’t but would profit if they where perceived to be

      • AtaraxiaEnglish
        3•8 months ago

        Hahahah and their phones are crap. I used to have one and it had a fake camera and after I activated it my debit card info was used by a scammer. Never had that happen before. And the crappy battery became a spicy pillow very fast.

    • @[email protected]English
      -49•8 months ago

      Of course. That’s because you blindly believe the country that wiretaps it’s allies, like Merkle in Germany. That spies on its citizens using systems like Prism. Arrests journalists who report this like Assange. Yeah, those guys are totally who you should believe. And no, Huawei still hasn’t had any evidence against them, only conjecture from that country.

      And I know what you’re going to say. You’re going to call me naive and that Huawei definitely does it. But yes go on trusting the country with a laundry list of violations.

      • RedjardEnglish
        37•8 months ago

        So you are saying that Huawei is better than Google, because Huawei has less suspicion about it than the US government, because we should not conflate a company from a country with the government og that country?

        While you are conflating Google and the US government without even so much as acknowledging that?

        If we are being fair, we must accept both the USA and China have the means to get data out of their companies, and have done so frequently. If we thus compare either Google and Huawei or USA and China, in both cases we can make out the shinier turd of the two clearly.

        Now can we go back to hating both of them please?

        • Ordoabchao
          12•8 months ago

          Exactly this. I am no fan of Google, but it’s the devil I know.

          • @[email protected]English
            -1•8 months ago

            Better the devil sitting right next to you than the devil that is far away in a different country?

          • RedjardEnglish
            17•8 months ago

            And they occasionally need to be debated anyway.
            Like with conspiracies and religious cults, not debating them allows them to pull people in, while debating them both gives those vulnerable the ability to see the issues with them, and it allows those already believing a pathway to exit.

        • xep
          7•8 months ago

          conflate a company from a country with the government of that country

          It’s actually okay to do this for China, because just about every private enterprise has a CCP cell now. It’s important to understand how state capitalism works with the CCP and China.

        • @[email protected]English
          -27•8 months ago

          I’m saying that the only hate for Huawei comes from the US government. Who constantly lies. So using their lies to form an opinion on Huawei is idiotic… I didn’t actually bring google into this at all.

          • RedjardEnglish
            17•8 months ago

            I have seen plenty of independent hate, and my hown hate has certainly developed independently too.
            Even in politics other countries have come to the same conclusion, some of which even against US influence, while certainly others where pulled along by them.

            Also did you notice that you jsut assumed I was completely influenced by the US, as in that you hold the innate belief that everyone who disagrees on this must obviously be doing so because they fell victim to their propaganda?

            I didn’t actually bring google into this at all.

            I’d trust a Huawei phone less than I would a Google phone. Much less.

            [your comment]

            • @[email protected]English
              -22•8 months ago

              Yeah a lot of people are influenced by US propaganda. That shouldn’t be surprising. However, let’s look at what experts in other countries that are not America say.

              https://www.reuters.com/article/us-huawei-europe-britain/britain-managing-huawei-risks-has-no-evidence-of-spying-official-idUSKCN1Q91PM

              https://phys.org/news/2018-12-evidence-huawei-spying-german-watchdog.html

              But those voices are drowned out because, well US propaganda is very powerful. So much so that yeah, it influences individuals.

              *Edit: And yes, US propaganda is so powerful it goes well beyond it’s borders affecting individuals in other nations as well. I’m not asking you to believe me, I’m asking you to question where you got those opinions from.

              • RedjardEnglish
                12•8 months ago

                First of, your articles are about telco hardware, not smartphones software.

                The german case basically boils down to Germany wanting independence in their critical infrastructure. At least officially this is so China can’t affect them by for example stopping exports of repair components. Basically your source is clickbait but without the release. »German governments information security branch says no evidence of Huawei spying … they say the boycott happened because of strategic resource independence in networking technology«

                The space of classical newspaper articles is not in a good state, basically it’s almost entirely propagandized to death. So you need to know your sources, please don’t be the one throwing around a phys.org article on politics like it’s credible information.

                source on the Germany thing

                I could clear up this case because I happen to know that “die Zeit” (German for “the Time”) is one of the few remaining relatively independent sources for stuff relating to Germany (they are biased to follow German politics in coverage but not content, currently). I also track them closely for any changes to that status, basically if they fall to anyones propaganda, the first ones to bring that to light and point it out will be the opposing propaganda. Here is their article, for your translators pleasure:
                https://www.zeit.de/politik/deutschland/2023-03/5g-ausbau-bundesregierung-verbot-huawei

                ⁤
                your source kinda goes into that direction at the end at least

                But some observers raised eyebrows at the BSI’s apparent dismissal of cyber security risks concerning Huawei.

                “I believe it’s wrong to suggest that the concerns about Chinese espionage are unfounded and easy to detect,” telecom security expert Ronja Kniep told AFP.

                “Even if Huawei has no official relationship with the Chinese government, that doesn’t mean Chinese services aren’t using the company and its technology as vehicles for espionage.”

                All three of Germany’s main mobile network operators use infrastructure provided by Huawei, Spiegel pointed out.

                So apparently the opinion of “the BSI” here is wildly out of line with Germany’s government’s general opinion at the time.

                but wait there’s more

                So apparently in Germany there is this “BSI-gate” of sorts, around the incompetence and potential Russian and Chinese relations of “Germany’s Federal Office for Information Security (BSI), Arne Schoenbohm” (as he is quoted in your source).
                So either way this person was extremely untrustworthy in this matter here.

                ⁤

                So now to the other source. Reuters is at least well known, and the article has an author, so that’s nice.

                I looked into the matter somewhat. Around the same date as your article, the BBC wrote

                To monitor the company, the UK set up the Huawei Cyber Security Evaluation Centre, which comes under the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC).

                In March 2019, it said it hadn’t found evidence of malicious Chinese state activity, but it did identify some serious defects in Huawei’s software engineering and cyber-security competence.

                Seems they harshened their stance after US influence around 2020 to me too, but it’s not like they where entirely unsuspicious before that influence either.

                • @[email protected]English
                  -11•8 months ago

                  Right so no evidence, just suspicion from the US was enough for them to harden their stance.

                  Your “rebuttals” doesn’t change any facts on the ground.

                  • RedjardEnglish
                    5•8 months ago

                    Did you not listen? I started with saying that your evidence wasn’t relevant to the matter at hand. This is about smartphones, not telco equipment.

                    Then I partially agreed with you on the uk case, and explained why your source on the german case was utter trash, and wrong.

                    There are no relevant facts for your original point on the ground, you didn’t bring any and I showed why. You spent your time moving goalposts and bringing up new unrelated issues.

                    The current state of the discussion is:

                    • the uk may have been influenced by the us to be harsher on huawei than need be
                    • both germany and the uk had and have consensus on some suspicions against huawei
                    • the suspicions in the uk where present before and got amplified after us action
                    • those suspicions are multi-factored, some of which apply to us as individuals and some do not

                    Your original claim was:
                    Huawei is better than Google, fear of Huawei is solely cause by propaganda.

                    No arguments have been made yet, the discussion has gone nowhere because I was stuck refuting your side-projects.

                    If you wanna look at actual facts, see for example this comment I made to someone elses .
                    There I go into some issues with Huawei itself, and the relations of it to the chinese government, as well as indications that they are trying to hide those for image reasons. That is a fact-based source that the relations are real, that they are creating propaganda to hide that, and why they would do that. If you are looking for facts go look at that.

                    I do not refute that the US is propagandizing against Huawei, and that they are influencing other governments to follow their decisions against Huawei, and thus their media influence to be directed to defending that and propagandizing against Huawei too.
                    I agree that this is happening, and I highly dislike it.

                    Just because a side is using propaganda, doesn’t mean they are wrong. Being careful we can filter out some facts, then filter those for what is relevant to us as consumers. And we end up with the result that Huawei smartphones are a privacy nightmare, basically any consumer tech with their software and internet access is, and should be avoided. Components and hardware by them is probably fine for now, so if are going to replace their software, or are gonna sandbox their devices, then to a consumer I see no reason not to buy from them (as opposed to governments, where there are valid reasons not to).

                    To summarize:

                    • you can (should) be against Huawei based on facts alone
                    • governments can ban Huawei for valid reasons
                    • your sources and reading comprehension suck
              • @[email protected]English
                -9•8 months ago

                They don’t want to think about it and would rather just mash the downvote button on you for not saying the “correct” words as taught to them by their friendly neighborhood multimedia empire.

                • @[email protected]English
                  8•8 months ago

                  Dude typed up a massive multi sourced comment rebutting the tankie, what are you smoking?

                  • @[email protected]English
                    -6•8 months ago

                    There was no rebuttal. All those words agreed with my statement, that there’s no evidence and they hardened their position because of the US.