Gionee guilty of planting malware on 20 million phones for more profits - Android

It appears that the malware on Gionee phones enabled unsolicited ads and are conducting other malicious activities to which the user is unaware of.

Shenzhen Zhipu Technology Co. Ltd., a Gionee subsidiary, is said to be the one who implanted the Trojan Horse via an OTA software update called Story Lock Screen.

It’s said that the initial devices infected by the Dark Horse Program were in December 2018. They kept on doing that for almost a year, and by October 2019, the company has affected 21.75 million phones and have earned USD4.2 million (around Php202 million). The said expenses are said to be only below USD1.3 million (around Php62.6 million).

The Chinese court has charged Pan Qi, Jia Zhengqiang, Zhu Ying, and Xu Li with controlling mobile devices illegally and are facing three to three and a half year of imprisonment with each having to pay a fine of CNY200,000 (around Php1.5 million).

It’s hard to be surprised when news like this comes up. As you know, Gionee has one of the cheapest phones around. Hence they resort to unsolicited ads to make more profit. Albeit, the way they executed it without the user’s consent is nothing short of illegal.

Other Chinese brands like Realme also use ads to make more money. But unlike what Gionee did, Realme is pretty transparent about it and is actually giving you an option to disable such ads.

Source: CNBeta

This article, Gionee guilty of planting malware on 20 million phones for more profits, was originally published at NoypiGeeks | Philippines Technology News, Reviews and How to's.