Just a few hours ago, a report from the Government of Lithuania has uncovered a large controversy with Xiaomi mobiles. According to the study carried out on a Xiaomi Mi 10T Xiaomi itself would have the ability to censor what users see on their phones. The censorship would come by keywords to block content that contained certain terms. It is a unique case that leaves Xiaomi’s security and transparency in a very bad place. If you have a company mobile, we recommend that you continue reading.
This would be the censorship of Xiaomi mobiles
It is important to start by saying that this censorship is not active in Western markets, so your device, at the moment, does not have any type of keyword censorship. The controversy comes after detecting that could be remotely deployed at any time. It is not active, but it could be tomorrow if Xiaomi wanted.
The Lithuanian cybersecurity agency has detected that Xiaomi phones have a list of blocked words called «MyAdBlockList«. Such a list can contain keywords that would be blocked from searches and ads depending on the country and region.
In the case of Lithuania, certain words related to the country’s independence, free Tibet and other controversial political aspects would be blocked. Even though the list exists, the report insists that it is not activated and that, therefore, censorship is not taking place. They also insist that such censorship could be activate remotely relatively easily.
Presumably this function would be intended for the Chinese market, because in the country censorship is a constant reality in politics, the environment or adult content.
It is possible that after uncovering this fact the company will talk about the problem and we will know more details. What is clear is that Xiaomi has the ability, at least on the Xiaomi Mi 10T, to censor certain content that it pleases. What do you think of this fact?