"Surprise! China's top Android phones collect way more info", 7 February 2023

In a paper titled "Android OS Privacy Under the Loupe – A Tale from the East," the trio of university boffins analyzed the Android system apps installed on the mobile handsets of three popular smartphone vendors in China: OnePlus, Xiaomi and Oppo Realme.

The research, conducted by Haoyu Liu (University of Edinburgh), Douglas Leith (Trinity College Dublin), and Paul Patras (University of Edinburgh), suggests that private information leakage poses a serious tracking risk to mobile phone customers in China, even when they travel abroad in countries with stronger privacy laws...

...Within this limited scope, the researchers found that Android handsets from the three named vendors "send a worrying amount of Personally Identifiable Information (PII) not only to the device vendor but also to service providers like Baidu and to Chinese mobile network operators."...

...The data collection from these devices doesn't change when the devices exit China, the researchers say, even though jurisdictions beyond the Middle Kingdom enforce more robust data protection regimes. And the boffins argue that this means the cited phone vendors and some third-parties can track Chinese travelers and students abroad and learn something about their foreign contacts.

Another of the researchers' findings is that there are three to four times more pre-installed third-party apps on Chinese Android distributions than there are on basic Android from other nations...

The Register asked OnePlus, Xiaomi and Oppo Realme to comment but they did not get a reply.