People are reporting that Huawei phones are automatically deleting videos of protests in China without notifying owners

[Captain Ninja Kid]

Summary

 As reported on twitter by Singaporean journalist Melissa Chen, Huawei devices have reportedly begun removing videos of the recent protests in China from users phones. While it is not currently known whether the data was locally stored on the user's device or in the cloud, this kind of censorship appears to be a new way for governments to silence their people.

My thoughts

 It is staggering to see how little control users have over their own data and the reach to which surveillance has already been baked into existing technology. My fear is that this kind of automatic censoring could find its way into other devices as users grow more and more willing to surrender ownership of their own data.

 

Sources

https://twitter.com/msmelchen/status/1597807914395500545

[LAwLz]

Do we actually have any evidence of this, other than one edited video from one phone showing some photos being corrupted?

 

This story is setting off some alarm clocks for me.

If they were deleting the pictures, why would they leave the actual file on the phone and just delete some data in the picture, leaving them visible in the gallery? If I were programming this feature, I would actually make the entire file get deleted, not just part of it. 

I heard about this story a few days ago and so far I have not seen any evidence except this one video. You'd assume that at least one more person would have experienced this and posted evidence of it. 

I am also wondering how the phone would know which photos to delete.

 

 

I am not saying that it isn't happening, but so far I have not seen enough evidence to believe that it is happening. Plus the alarm bells such as the one I mentioned above actually makes me lean slightly towards the "this is not true" side. At least for now.

[TetraSky]

I wouldn't be surprised if it was true. But I'm not sure how it would work locally, as the videos would need to be scrubbed and compared against a database to see what it contains. Were the videos uploaded to some cloud service ?

[solado]

55 minutes ago, Caroline said:

You give up on your privacy the moment you buy a smartphone, Huawei or not.

 

It's simply not written on the box.

I dunno, Huawei to be fair is pretty open they collect your data in the privacy policy, that's kinda like on the box right.

[Heliian]

This story sounds like it comes from someone who thinks everyone in China has a Huawei.  

 

We've already seen tons of videos about the controls and protests so I highly doubt a big conspiracy.  

[SansVarnic]

-= Thread Locked =-

 

The moderation team has reviewed this and decided to keep it locked.

While some topics may overlap between technology and politics, this topic is deeply based on ongoing political protests and the related concerns of those protests. It would not be possible to separate that from any potential technology related discussion and for that reason it isn't appropriate for this forum.

- @Spotty

Edited December 9, 2022 by Spotty