A security firm, NowSecure, discovered that nearly half of Africa’s smartphones are sending hidden user data to China-linked servers. Almost all the smartphones produced by Transsion Holdings contain an embedded telemetry system capable of collecting sensitive information, which includes users’ GPS location, app usage, mobile data consumption, and camera activation events
The good news is that the research does not allege that data on passwords, messages, photographs, or financial transactions were collected. However, the government, especially the Nigeria Data Protection Commission (NDPC), should ensure that personal data of Nigerians is lawfully collected based on local laws and international standards. Any phone maker found violating the Nigeria Data Protection Act (NDPA) 2023 should be sanctioned accordingly.
How is this different from Android sending data to Google and iOS sending data to Apple? It is happening on a different level of the phone as a whole, but it is the same kind of stuff. So what is the big deal? Sending data to America is good but to China is bad? I assume that every phone maker and OS is violating the NDPA law, and anyway the law can sometimes be softened to make it more easily for manufacturer to pass it. So even if data protections exist, they still allow big companies often to collect a lot of data for many reasons which is not a good thing at all.
That data transmitted are majorly for development and upgrades, practically what it is is that the developers need to get some data not sensitive or personal datas or app none like that.
Any kind of feature that involves the transferring or even just recording of some data can be updated to expand the data recording. You need to forget about defending cases like this in any way, this kind of thing should not even be possible under any circumstance but as I mention in my answer above it is happening all the time. If the companies want to include data collection mechanisms then fine, but there must be an option to turn everything off with a single button. This should be possible for software and hardware, but these days there is no country in the world where you can disable all telemetry on a phone.