I started examining the apps on my phone and saw that all the preinstalled system apps had been modified to siphon off social media data to Chinese servers.

I collected as much information as I could to report the manufacturer to the Facebook.

Several months later the New York Times reported that Facebook had been allowing cellphone manufacturers (including Alcatel) to access users social media data regardless of what privacy settings the user had set because FB considered them “Trusted partners”

Alcatel has been found to have placed backdoors with root access and hard coded credentials in TCL branded televisions and their smartphones have been reported for DNS rebinding attacks to TCL clouds and also having packet sniffers in their low-end smartphones.

IMO: this sort of stuff means the pinephone actually has a better UX than the cheaper android phones despite calls and SMS often not working because the basic "computer with cellular data" works exactly the way you would expect.

Hint: it's not marketing.

iPhones are pitched and priced to appeal to the highest social status possible, the rest bleeds down from there.

The percentage of people who buy iPhones specifically because of debated security benefits is substantially smaller. People who may have heard this but dont know/understand it will find it simply reinforces their existing preference for an iPhone on the earlier grounds.

The app is also ubiquitous in Taiwan and Thailand from my personal experience. It's very bad news for Taiwan if the PRoC has been snooping on its citizens.

But their technology sucks.

They don't have typing indicators. Vietnam, Japan, Thailand are separate fiefdoms, there are certain things you can't do across countries.

To open a business account you have to pay a secondary firm in Thailand who barely has anything to do with LINE.

The whole UI is super-clunky and has many bugs.

We get the feeling that they do not really care about the product itself. They keep adding lots of features for business that don't really work.

But everyone here uses it, so you really have to get on board.

Also, for anyone who doesn't know, LINE is ubiquitous in East Asia and parts of South East Asia. In Japan and Korea, everyone and their grandmother are there. Not being on LINE here is "worse" than not being on FB in the west.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26488445

On a different note: Has KakaoTalk gone out of fashion in korea? I thought line was mostly Japan and Taiwan and korea was KakaoTalk, China WeChat and everywhere else WhatsApp.

But I have noticed line appearing in some never kdramas.

This is just an idea though, I have no real basis for the claim. I have noticed the same thing, though.

I doubt you'd do that as a mean to show a generic chat. I think that is more of an attempt to make inroads in Korea (or perhaps pandering to viewers outside Korea)

It's absolutely the case in Japan, though.

LINE is bigger than WhatsApp in Taiwan and I think Thailand, though.

It’s also my primary messaging app. What’s App is only used for business stuff in Singapore.

The metadata - who talks to who and when - in many cases is more valuable to an adversary than the actual content of the messages. All the crypto in the world doesn't help once the identity of one person you associate with becomes "of interest" you are of interest too and old-fashioned methods can be used.

They are all easy targets for intel and manipulation, and any nation that cannot manage its own tech faces uncomfortable strategic vulnerability.