Finland’s data protection ombudsman yesterday said that he would investigate whether Nokia-branded phones had breached data rules, after a report said the handsets sent information to China.
Nokia-branded mobile phones are developed under licence by Finnish company HMD Global, which said no personal data had been shared with a third party, although it said there had been a data software glitch with one batch of handsets that had been fixed.
Ombudsman Reijo Aarnio told reporters that he would assess whether there were any breaches that involved “personal information and if there has been a legal justification for this.”
The Norwegian Broadcasting Corp (NRK) yesterday reported a data breach related to the Nokia 7 Plus model, built by HMD.
It said the company had “admitted that an unspecified number of Nokia 7 Plus phones had sent data to the Chinese server.”
Nokia, which receives royalties from HMD, but has no direct investment in the firm, declined to comment.
NRK said it was alerted to the data issue after a Nokia 7 Plus user contacted them to say his smartphone often contacted a particular server, sending data packages in an unencrypted format.
HMD had declined to say who owned the serve, NRK said.
“We can confirm that no personally identifiable information has been shared with any third party,” HMD Global said in an e-mail, adding there had been “an error in software packaging process in a single batch of one device model.”
“Such data was never processed and no person could have been identified based on this data,” HDM said, adding the error had been fixed last month and that nearly all affected devices had installed the fix.
Nokia sold its handset business to Microsoft in 2014, which sold it to HMD in 2016.
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