Voice of America (VOA) Chinese Edition recently reported that the Finnish authorities are currently investigating the case of certain Nokia cellphone models that are sending sensitive user data to China without the phone owner’s knowledge. The Nokia 7 Plus manufacturer, HMD Global, admitted that there are bugs in the software. The Finnish authorities suspected that the cellphone vendor violated EU data privacy and protection laws. An assessment process is underway. According to NRK, the Norwegian government-owned radio and television public broadcasting company, one of the Nokia users told them that his Nokia 7 Plus cellphone has been connecting to and sending data to servers that China Telecom owned. HMD Global insisted that no data was shared with any other government. Some analysts expressed the belief that these cellphones were designed to sell in the Chinese market; however, some mistakes were made and they were sold in Europe. This event added uncertainty to the global 5G deployment war. Ericsson and Nokia are considered the replacements for Chinese vendor Huawei, since more and more countries are banning Huawei.
Source: VOA Chinese, March 22, 2019
https://www.voachinese.com/a/nokia-phone-data-breach-20190321/4841871.html