Nokia is in trouble for sending data to China.

Things were a lot simpler when
Nokia just made Windows Phones

That's quite a wrong turn.

ALL CHINESE SMARTPHONE brands get in occasional hot water for sending data to mysterious servers in mainland China, but they do at least have a certain amount of plausible deniability against anything more untoward. For HMD Global and its Nokia-branded phones, it's a bit harder to explain away, as data seems to be on a 3,700-mile detour from Finland to China.

The report comes from Norway's public broadcaster NRK, which was tipped off to the covert data broadcast by Henrik Austad: a man who found his Nokia 7 was sending unencrypted data to "vnet.nc", which seems to be managed by state-owned China Telecom.

Is that bad? Well, yes, and especially for HMD Global. While the information gathered - things like user location, SIM card number and device serial number - couldn't be used to identify a user, it's still a big GDPR no no. Earlier this year Google got a €50m Euro fine for iffy data usage in France, and it looks like HMD Global could be in for a similar painful slap on the wrist, now the country's data protection ombudsman is investigating.  

By Alan Martin.

Full story at The Inquirer.