A digital expert on Friday urged people to regularly change their passwords or security patterns on their cellphones, computers and tablets to better protect their information.
The warning came amid concern that telecommunications equipment from China’s Huawei Technologies Co (華為) allegedly contains “backdoors” that could allow the Chinese military to conduct espionage.
Varying degrees of bans on Huawei products exist in the US, Australia, New Zealand and Japan, while Taiwan in 2013 banned the use of core telecoms equipment manufactured by Chinese companies.
Photo provided by the Criminal Investigation Bureau
The Industrial Technology Research Institute and the Institute of Information Industry have announced that their internal networks do not support Huawei phones or computers.
Lin Hsin-hsu (林信旭), who is better known as Lin Hsiao-hsu (林小旭), said that information is constantly being uploaded to company servers regardless of whether a person is using Facebook or Google, or a cellphone, tablet or computer.
Data uploaded include registration information, membership information and cellphone builds, he said, adding that this is what enables cellphones to download updated software.
Therefore, Chinese cellphone firms, such as Huawei or Xiaomi, are transmitting data back to their company servers, which could be a security concern, Lin said.
Information technology companies say that data collection is used to improve their products, Lin said, adding that nowadays it would be very difficult to block or prevent one’s data from being uploaded, unless one cuts themselves off from the Internet.
Regularly changing security patterns and passwords and avoiding phishing Web sites would go a long way to protect personal information, he said.
It would be hard to prove what companies are doing with the collected data, but consumers should be wary, a source in the IT industry said.
It is common knowledge that government agencies are on the alert, but further discussion on whether all Chinese brands should be placed under scrutiny should be conducted, the source said
Methods, such as preventing Chinese-brand phones with camera functions from being imported, should be discussed, as cellphone cameras could be hacked and used to take photographs even when the screen is off, the source said.
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