Your phone is getting to know you, but it's not necessarily a good sign.
Mobile phone users often encounter such a phenomenon in their daily life: a certain item mentioned in WeChat or offline chat immediately appears on the recommended home page of the shopping website, a piece of clothing that has just been purchased online, but the same model is frequently recommended by irrelevant short videos and social apps, and when a question is in their minds, the APP pop-up window will write the desired answer in the next second.
It may seem that the advancement of technology has made life more convenient, but behind it is the hidden concern that personal information will be leaked anytime and anywhere. Few users know when this information is in the hands of an app from an unknown source, and when it is quietly transmitted from the mobile terminal to other places.
On Weibo, the topic of #Why APP always knows what you want to buy# was also rushed to the hot search. When every small behavior is placed under a magnifying glass, mobile phone users pay more attention to privacy protection. In the evaluation system of a mobile phone, the safety protection function has become an increasingly important reference standard.
Why can the mobile phone "see" through you?
An important reason why mobile phones can predict user behavior is that the APP captures user portraits. For example, if you fill in information such as gender, age, height, and weight on the profile page of an e-commerce website, the website will automatically push clothing suitable for the target group, and recommend similar brands and styles based on the products that the user has purchased.
On the other hand, there is a privacy leak that is not easily noticed by users. In the settings page, once an app's microphone or camera access is enabled, it may work in the background and record the user's behavior and Xi even when the user is not using the app.
In accordance with the Personal Information Protection Law, all apps are required to clearly indicate the purpose, method and scope of processing personal information in the user notice, and apps (including third-party SDKs) should not collect personal information without the user's consent. However, in practice, there are still a considerable number of apps that are not clearly stated and use word games to package the specific ways of handling personal sensitive information.
According to media statistics, since 2022, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has notified 10 batches of more than 500 apps that infringe on users' rights and interests. Among them, "mandatory, frequent, and excessive requests for permissions" and "illegal collection of users' personal information" are the two hardest hit areas of domestic APP infringement of user privacy in the past two years.
In addition to apps that are available in app stores, some users will download so-called "cracked" apps because of the temptation to do so. At this year's CCTV 315 party, technicians conducted real-time monitoring of the cracked versions of more than ten commonly used videos, music, novels and other application software, and found that these software were additionally embedded with third-party plug-ins that were not related to the official version. Once the app is up and running, these plug-ins can secretly read the user's key identifying information and form an accurate portrait of the user, so as to push a large number of ads.
Many users have taken the initiative to "fight back" against this kind of information theft, such as turning off the app's access to some mobile phone functions, but this will also cause inconvenience to daily life: turning off the camera permission, the app cannot scan the code and authenticate, and the location permission is turned off, and the app cannot push accurate content such as food delivery and local life.
Some netizens even found that even if these access rights were turned off, the information leak still existed. Endless spam text messages and harassing phone calls affect the daily life and even property safety of mobile phone users. What's even more dangerous is that the voice, fingerprint, and facial recognition data stored in people's mobile phones can be easily stolen by criminals with just a simple SDK.
The information leakage of a single application may be difficult to pay attention to, but driven by big data and artificial intelligence, when all the user's behaviors on the mobile phone are integrated and summarized, a "person" in a digital space is generated, and it may become a tool for criminals to collect money. A common example is that many scam calls start with "Have you recently purchased XX items on XX website?"
Let users take the initiative in privacy protection
The "China Unicom Artificial Intelligence Privacy Protection White Paper" released by China Unicom analyzes the logic behind this phenomenon: the reason why artificial intelligence can provide mobile phone users with the "convenience" of information leakage is inseparable from the "feeding" of a large amount of training data. However, due to the imperfect market-oriented mechanism of data sharing, trading and circulation, there are improper collection behaviors such as illegal data, buying and selling data, dark web data, and some unauthorized collection behaviors.
This is the new challenge brought about by new technologies - the industry's high dependence on data is in conflict with the public's demand for basic services and personal information protection. If you rely on corporate self-discipline alone, it is already difficult to break through the dilemma between commercial exploitation and privacy leakage.
According to the "Digital Security Capability Insight Report" jointly released by China Software Evaluation Center and ANHENG Information, in order to prevent potential new attacks and content compliance and other security risks caused by the abuse of artificial intelligence, the security industry cannot rely on human guesswork to solve problems piecemeal, and it is imperative to take intelligent actions to resolve these evolving threats.
As the most important extension of equipment in people's daily life, mobile phone security measures also need an intelligent innovation.
Traditional security protection methods such as password locks and one-click virus removal can no longer meet the needs of existing users. Users need more proactive, targeted, and clearer privacy protection solutions. It needs to give users the initiative to extract and use data, while not costing too much time.
Huawei's Mate60 series mobile phones can provide a reference for the industry.
In the newly upgraded application control center, you can visualize the running status of all applications. Whenever a user installs a risky app, the phone will send a blocking reminder, and if it is forcibly installed, the system will automatically control it. Users can also move risky apps into the App Control Center, restricting app access to sensitive data and pop-ups, while hiding real user data from them. When a risky app requests permissions, the system grants them to a minimum.
In addition, the Huawei Mate60 series mobile phones also bring the application tracking management function, which provides a unified entrance to manage application tracking permissions, and the user chooses whether to allow the application to track their activities in other applications and websites, and returns the choice of data to the user.
Initiative, this seems to be the place that mobile phone manufacturers tend to ignore when developing security protection functions in the past. But in an era where AI and big data are ubiquitous, it's even more important for users to understand where their data is coming from and where it's going.
Privacy protection is Huawei's top priority
In 2019, Huawei's founder, Ren Zhengfei, issued Document No. 1 stating that cybersecurity and privacy protection are the highest principles of the company's work. Specific to the terminal business, it always attaches the highest level of importance to the privacy and security of users, and does not hesitate to invest in it.
Application tracking and risk management are just one aspect of the story. From the start of a new device to the disposal of the device, the Huawei Mate60 series provides users with security risk management and control functions from the beginning to the end. This protection is not limited to a single feature definition, but is system-level protection.
Since the release of HarmonyOS, privacy has been a key part of the process. In 2022, Huawei's HarmonyOS 3 Security Technical White Paper pointed out that HarmonyOS provides a convenient and efficient system for the entire ecosystem, but it has higher requirements for user privacy and network security protection.
In order to cope with these new security requirements, HarmonyOS proposes a security architecture based on a hierarchical security theory system, focusing on "the right people, through the right devices, and the right access to data" to build a new set of pure applications and an orderly and transparent ecological order, bringing consumers and developers a new experience of secure distributed collaboration, strict privacy protection, and data security.
As the most important extension device in users' daily life, mobile phones often store a large amount of sensitive information that is highly related to information security. For example, human health data, movement paths and Xi, location information, company, community and even home access control, face, voice command or voiceprint data. How to ensure that each type of data is not leaked while being retrieved and used normally is a challenge that mobile phone manufacturers need to face.
The Huawei Mate 60 series classifies and processes this data. Sensitive personal information such as voiceprint data and voice commands will only be processed on the device side, while personal health data is stored in the mobile app through device-level key encryption, and each device will generate a key belonging to the device, which cannot be decrypted even by Huawei. The decision on the use of all personal data is reserved only for the user.
For apps to access data without permission, the Huawei Mate60 series phones provide two functional modes. In Super Privacy mode, all apps are prevented from accessing the device's camera, microphone, and location data with one click, preventing malicious apps from accessing the camera, microphone, and location data without the user's knowledge.
Giving users the right to choose, and providing the best solution when users don't know how to choose, is also the privacy protection function that users need the most. Not all users have a clear understanding of how to set up app access, and it's difficult to accurately determine why an app is requesting permissions. The HUAWEI Mate 60 series allows users to achieve the most comprehensive security protection with the simplest operation.
In an era when technology penetrates into every crevice of life, this may be the biggest demand for smartphones by users.
*The above content does not constitute investment advice, does not represent the views of the publishing platform, the market is risky, investment needs to be cautious, please make independent judgment and decision-making.