zlacker

>>el_dud+(OP)
Before I went to China I bought a burner phone, mainly to install WeChat (which is also a kind of malware and also "required" in China). Basic Android phones are not too expensive these days - I wonder if it will become commonplace to own several and physically separate your life across them?

FWIW I got a Huawei phone (Honor 10 Lite) for under 200 EUR, but much cheaper phones than that are available.

Edit: To be clear this is not to avoid Chinese surveillance. That's unavoidable whatever you do because China is a police state. It's to separate out that surveillance from my contacts and my regular life at home. (I also think it's at least arguable that the Chinese government has a duty to look closely at what foreigners are up to. It's not an argument that I agree with myself very much because it infringes freedom while also making the wrong trade-offs, but given we live in a world of nation states it follows logically from that.)

>>rwmj+k6
I bought a dual sim Mi phone for this purpose as well. It worked out really well. At the border crossing from Hong Kong into mainland china, they didn't seem interested in my devices fortunately. Still will wipe my phone before I use it again, however.

>>eladri+X7
even if you wipe your phone you can still have a compromised baseband.

>>kjafta+Zh1
Could you elaborate a bit on this please? I have never heard of such a phenomena which intrigues me quite a bit!

>>manjan+WI1
All phones have a 'baseband' firmware which controls the actual radio hardware - it's a binary blob installed by the manufacturer and generally not available to the user to tinker with, although as expected there have been many projects to reverse-engineer them. The firmware exists 'beneath' the OS and all user settings, so in theory, if it's compromised (and there have been PoCs), anything that happens in the baseband would survive a wipe and reinstall of the OS. Basically it means putting malware in a place that the user cannot delete it from.

Malware in the baseband firmware could theoretically intercept or disrupt radio traffic, or migrate from the firmware to the phone via other exploits in the OS to gain even more control. In essence, it's a particularly nasty thing that surveillance states would definitely use to their advantage.

This is why 'burner' devices should be exactly that - destroyed after use, because you simply cannot trust them after they've been anywhere near an invasive surveillance setting.