Canadian IT engineer in Taiwan discovers Huawei Mediapad M5 is snooping on him from China
Taiwan News
Date: 2019/05/08
By: Keoni Everington, Taiwan News, Staff Writer
Stock photo of store in China. (By Associated Press)
TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — After news broke that a Huawei P30 Pro was apparently querying servers in China, a Canadian IT engineer who lives in Taiwan says he has discovered that his Huawei Mediapad M5 is spying on him through several apps.
The engineer, who is skilled in computers, cellphones, and data networks, told Taiwan News that whenever he buys a new cellphone, he always installs a noroot firewall application to block unwanted snooping. After installing the firewall program on his newly purchased Huawei Mediapad M5, he found that Huawei was using his device to snoop on his activities and will not allow him to disable the offending apps.
The man said that he purchased the Huawei Mediapad M5 tablet/smartphone about six months ago, and it is the 8.1″ sized model. He said that he had mainly used the firewall program to identify apps that were running in the background so he could disable them to save battery power.
He soon discovered several applications running in the background on his Huawei device that are sending data to China, but he never authorized them to do so. Despite the fact that he opted to disable them, the apps are still running in the background and he says he no longer has access to them. [FULL STORY]
