A few months ago, Lithuania’s Defense Ministry recommended consumers to avoid buying Chinese smartphones and advised them to throw away the ones they already had, after a government report had found that the devices featured built-in censorship capabilities.
Relating to the matter, Lithuania’s state cybersecurity body had also given a statement saying that Xiaomi phones had a built-in ability to detect and censor certain terms such as “Free Tibet”, “Long live Taiwan independence” or “democracy movement.”
Since these terms were sensitive to some Chinese citizens, hence, the company had incorporated special software to identify and censor them.
The Chinese tech giant had denied the accusations and to dispute this further, had even hired a third-party cyber security expert to assess the allegations by Lithuania that its smartphones carry built-in censorship capabilities.
Recently, a German IT watchdog group had also begun its own investigation into the matter. The group, although, found no evidence of any kind of added censorship tools to the Xiaomi smartphones.
The IT group added that “As a result, we were unable to identify any anomalies that would require further investigation or other measures”.
In other words, it is clear that there is no evidence as of now that backs the accusations from the Lithuanian government.
The previous report of Lithuania’s National Cyber Centre’s report had also claimed that the Xiaomi phones were found sending encrypted phone usage data to a server in Singapore. The report further stated that a security flaw was found in the P40 5G phone by China’s Huawei but nothing of the sort was found in the phones from another Chinese maker, OnePlus.
