How can such a good phone cost so little?Ĭirlig, who was listed on Romania’s Forbes 30 under 30 in 2018 for his work on cybersecurity, decided to buy the Redmi Note 8 right away. It’s a beautiful, fast phone, with a good camera as well, but the new price is only £150. He told Follow the Money that he was particularly intrigued by the price-quality ratio: he didn’t trust it. On his way home, Cirlig had seen an advertisement for the Redmi Note 8, the latest smartphone from the Chinese tech company Xiaomi. Countries like China, Russia and Iran do.’ Read moreĪfter a long day at work in the spring of 2020, cybersecurity expert Gabriel Cirlig enters his London flat. Moreover, the US does not have an offensive espionage programme against the Netherlands.
Bart Groothuis, Member of the European Parliament for the VVD and previously head of the Cyber Security Bureau of the Ministry of Defence, told Follow the Money: ‘In the United States, this concerns legislation embedded in a democratic constitutional state, where each request from a government service goes through the courts. But this is preceded by a system of checks and balances. In the United States, the government can also force companies to share data. For example, companies often have a party committee that ensures that companies follow the line of the Chinese Communist Party. China also has a weaker separation between private and government parties.
In China, companies are legally obliged to share user data with the government upon request. Are those models sold in the Netherlands as well? Why hasn’t such a warning been issued here? We spoke extensively with cybersecurity experts at home and abroad and with a member of the European Parliament specialising in this issue, and we read several articles and reports on the matter. We read that the Lithuanian government warned its citizens about Xiaomi phones, which triggered our curiosity. How did we go about investigating this?.Dutch cybersecurity experts call for a thorough investigation of these phones but fear that the Netherlands will refrain from doing so – because of our economic dependence on China. It has been disabled for Europe but can be enabled remotely. Lithuanian researchers also discovered censorship software in a Xiaomi model. The Chinese government can access this data. Smartphones from Chinese brand Xiaomi massively share user data with the company’s servers, including data of European users.
0 kommentar(er)
