There was no cracked software on this device at all. And also, there were absolutely NO ads, until I installed a few apps that introduced some AdMob ads. But I knew about them. You know, informed consent and all of that.

Although I did run a packet sniffer on my router to see if there was Chinese server contact, and there was. That was because the GPS config had NTP servers polling from China. I kind of expect that for a device sold to the Chinese, so it didn't exactly set off buzzers in my head.

Once I changed that, no more talkey to China. I guess there could be a few packets of UDP per week that I'd not catch, or cell-only data transmit. But tell me: how's that any worse than say Motorola?

I'm not familiar with Motorola but I used China Telecom's 3G dongle and was amazed by the amount of sneaky tracking they were doing. Frequently, I could see (in Chrome web inspector) that random pages were wrapped in iframes, with extra JavaScript for tracking. The JS was pinging Chinese servers and sending visited pages, clicked links, and who knows what.

Any Chinese software you install will do something similar. You install one software (for instance, a popular messenger like QQ or some online banking software) and get half a dozen processes and services running all the time with admin privileges (which they've asked during installation).

It's a mix of carelessness and greed, and there's no limit to it since consumers here don't have much power to change anything. That's why I'd be careful with a Chinese smart phone.