In Finland, investigations have been launched into the company HMD Global, which produces smartphones under the Nokia brand.
What happened
The leak was reported by NRK (Norwegian Broadcastingcorporation"), which received a "tip" from regular user Henrik Ostad. He noticed that his Nokia 7 Plus was regularly contacting an unknown server. The smartphone sent GPS coordinates, network information, device serial number and its owner’s SIM card number to this server, all in unencrypted form.
As it turned out, the information was sent to the serverin the domain vnet.cn, which is allegedly owned by the Chinese state company China Telecom. “It is likely that this application was intended for the Chinese market, but it was accidentally distributed to Nokia 7 Plus phones outside of China,” NRK notes.
Already fixed
HMD Global confirmed that smartphonesactually transmitted data. The company explained that this was a “software failure in a batch of one of the device models.” At the same time, no personal information was passed on to third parties.
This bug was fixed last month, with almost all affected devices reinstalling the updated software.
Despite this, the Data Protection OfficerFinland Reijo Aarnio promised that the agency will investigate a possible violation of data security rules and will study what happened from the legal side.