News written by Petteri Pyyny (March, 2019)

Norwegian public broadcaster NRK has found out that Nokia's Android phone, Nokia 7 Plus, leaks data to servers in China.

The data leak was found out by a Norwegian citizen, Henrik Austad, who wanted to find out what his phone sends over the Internet. He found out that his phone sent an unencrypted data burst every time a phone was switched on. This data package included phone's location, SIM card number and phone's serial number among other details.

The data was sent unencrypted over the Internet to a server located in China, operated by Chinese government-owned ISP China Telecom.

Nokia itself doesn't manufacture phones nowadays, but instead, has licensed its brand to another Finnish company called HMD Global. HMD Global says that the claims are true, but were caused by a bug in specific production batch - and that the issue has since been fixed with later production phones. HMD Global also says that the information leak didn't include anything that could be associated to a specific person or to allow tracking of a specific person.

As HMD Global is based in Finland (as is Nokia whose license they are using), the Finnish Office of the Data Protection Ombudsman has announced that they will start an official investigatio into this matter. European Union's GDPR data procetion directive states clearly that while data can be pretty much freely transferred within the European Union, with user's consent, the transfer of data to outside of the European Union is a different matter. With such case, there needs to be a legal rationale behind the data transfer and the user should know about it.

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All major Facebook's properties - Instagram, and WhatsApp - are experiencing a global hiccup. All services are either unavailable or having problems as of now.

The problems started around 17:00 UTC and have continued at least until now, according to thousands of Twitter messages and monitoring sites such as DownDetector.

Some of the services seem to be working partially. WhatsApp users are reporting that normal text-based messages can be sent normally, but messages including multimedia cannot be sent. Instagram showed just an error message on its frontpage. Also, WhatsApp calls seem to be working only for some users.

It is not known what has caused the outage, but Twitter hashtags such as #whatsappdown are trending globally.

Can txt but not send multimedia or status updates. Anybody with same prblm? #whatsappdown

-- Sohail Kazi🇮🇳 (@SohailKazi02) 13. maaliskuuta 2019

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In Finland, a petition to ban 5G networks completely is pushing forward. The reason for such petition? Electromagnetic radiation. Or actually the fears of electromagnetic radiation.

For as long as various radio equipment have existed, there have been people who claim to get ill due electromagnetic radiation. Despite all the scientific studies debunking such claims, the claims persist - and tend to strengthen every time a new radio frequency is being taken into use. In this case, Finland already operates handful of 5G networks in 3.5GHz radio frequency and operators plan to roll out networks nationwide within next year or two.

People behind the petition are concerned about the new frequency and also about the fact that 5G networks require much more network towers than the previous 3G and 4G networks, as the coverage area of one cell tower is smaller in 5G networks.

For initiative to be Legally binding and to force the national parliament to officially consider the merits of the petition, it requires 50,000 people to sign the petition. So far, the petition has appx. 2,000 signatures. Finland has population of appx. 5.5 million.

The petition is based on Finnish law of citizen initiative that has managed to change handful of laws already. The official "ban the 5G networks" initiative can be found here (in Finnish).