The Lithuanian Ministry of Defense, which detected a built-in censorship feature on smartphones manufactured in China, warned its citizens not to throw away their Xiaomi smartphones and not buy new ones.
The entrenched censorship feature that moved the country emerged after the Lithuanian Ministry of Defense's report in conjunction with the National Cyber Security Center. According to the information disclosed in the report, Xiaomi has started to use the features of detecting and censoring some terms such as "Free Tibet", "Long age-free Taiwan", "democracy movements" on its smartphones in China.
The Ministry stated that they have detected that this feature is also present in Xiaomi Mi 10T 5G phones that are on sale in Europe, and that although this feature is disabled for now, the built-in censorship can be activated by remote intervention.
It turns out that Xiaomi phones are transmitting confidential data to a server in Singapore.
In the published report, it was stated that a total of 449 Chinese terms were included in the censorship list, together with the terms mentioned above, and it was stated that the built-in censorship was also applied in the activities performed via the browser. The Ministry of Defense emphasized that citizens living in Lithuania should throw their Xiaomi phones in the trash and should not buy another phone of the same brand.
Deputy Minister of Defense Margiris Abukevicius said the following statements in a statement to journalists after the publication of the report; "Our advice is not to buy new Chinese phones and get rid of previously purchased ones as quickly as possible."
The National Cyber Center stated that they detected that Xiaomi phones were sending encrypted phone usage data to a server in Singapore. While the same vulnerability was detected in the P40 5G phone, it was stated that OnePlus brand phones did not have features such as built-in censorship or secret data transmission.
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