Recently, the Nokia 7 Plus — the best phone from the new HMD-owned Nokia by far — was found to be sending private data from a Norwegian user's phone to a remote server in China. It seems that every time the phone was turned on, unencrypted data containing Henrik Austad's location, the SIM card number, and the phone's serial number went flying through the tubes to a Chinese server. HMD Global says this was an "error in the packing process of software" and that it has been fixed.

This may be the most recent case of such a "mistake" but it's not the only one. Most notably, OnePlus was found to be doing the same thing in a beta build, and also fixed things pronto. We're glad the companies involved provide quick fixes, but how in the hell does this sort of "mistake" happen?

China has laws, too

For starters, collecting and sending the data isn't a mistake. The software was written this way on purpose and the data being collected and sent to China is supposed to be collected and sent to China. Just saying "it's a mistake" makes it sound like a software engineer somewhere screwed up while writing the code.

If you want to sell phones in China, you have to build tracking software into them.

Where the screw up really happened is when the software was built for markets outside of China. The Chinese government requires users of mobile devices to provide this information every time they are being used. When you light up your screen, the Chinese version of Big Brother wants to know where you are and it does so by tracking the hardware by location. The debate about how horrible and overbearing this sort of law is aside, the people who wrote the OS for phones like the Nokia 7 Plus were required to do this and it sounds like they have done a good job.

If a company were to try and sell a phone that doesn't comply with these laws, it would face the wrath of the Chinese government. So would the software engineers who didn't include the "feature". It's no wonder why it's done for phones made and sold in China.

Norway is not China