Well, Trump seemed to be in a minority of one when he started on that, but maybe by some freak of nature he was right. It certainly won't improve their Electronic exports!

The fact is, everything has an FPGA or an ASIC in it. These can have any number of devices. The southbridge type device in each PC has disk controllers, network card, wifi chip, bluetooth, infra-red, GPS if someone takes the humour, keyboard, mouse, usb, and whatever else, usually in precompiled cores.

Where this gets interesting is because of the special position of Taiwan. So much semiconductor stuff to drive the world's devices goes through Taiwan'S TSMC. They will be the only ones able to manufacture the next generation of 3nm chip wafers. They will certainly be the first. IBM's 2nm looks like a proof-of-concept only and some imaginative accounting.

Would the West go to war to save Taiwan? It may come down to that. Otherwise, no joy on the 3nm chips, and progress halts. In fact, any product fitted with them could only get bugged replacements if China takes over Taiwan.

Not the software though, and the article only mentions software.
I am not sure to what extent any of this also applies to firmware (which is more likely to be made in China). But I think I remember some articles from years ago where firmware spying was an issue.

Firmware is an interesting one.

A chip or IP core (for putting in an ASIC) say for example a network card, can be released with a proprietary cpu inside. This could simply be a standard cpu with the instruction set changed - easy to do at that low level. The point is, nobody outside your company would know exactly what the firmware actually did. It would perhaps be a wise move for some of these larger firms with the Chinese Government looking over your shoulder so intrusively.

Even now, there's no onus oon a company to disclose what their internal cpu is. Then, they can simply say it's proprietary if asked. It may cost them DoD sales.

What I haven't figured is what they do with all the data. They have more data than google.

Well, you have answered your own question - because what does google do with all that data? They broker it and make a f*ckton of money in the process. In fact "making a ton of money" seems too small a term considering how big Google/Alphabet really is.
So, that's what others also do with that data. They sell it. Maybe to their government, maybe to someone else - the principle is the same.

From a business perspective - the Chinese manufacturers want to sell devices to the "the west"... any surveillance tech / back doors, whatever you want to call it, or just telemetry which "talks" to servers which are owned by companies which have, or could be conceived as having, close links to the government, is just bad PR waiting to happen. Bad PR = lost reputation and lost sales, especially in the west where fear-mongering over China (and Russia) abounds. Who benefits from that? The competition - who happen to be US based big tech...

XDA Developers actually investigated the claims:

https://www.xda-developers.com/xiaom...ist-explained/

So, just some sort of strange adblock list.
What an interesting and utterly half-baked article. Like most of xda-developers, really.
I can't say I'm bothered by any of this, but it's always interesting to get a glimpse into this parallel universe of "smart"phone users. Who probably outnumber us by orders of magnitude.

Yes, I'm with you on that - however he does quite a bit more investigation into actual the issue than UK mainstream media...

The BBC article amounts to: "this random guy in Lithuania says that Chinese phones are loaded with spyware and censorship... well it's the Chinese..."