Lithuanian government warns consumers not to buy new Chinese phones and to throw out old ones ASAP
The Defence Ministry of Lithuania has issued a warning that people should stop buying phones from China and should "get rid of those already purchased as fast as reasonably possible".
The extraordinary advice comes after a government report found that handsets produced by Xiaomi and Huawei include a feature to detect and censor certain words and phrases. On the blacklist are terms such as "free Tibet", "long live Taiwan independence" or "democracy movement", and while the censoring functionality was disabled for the European market, there is the potential for it to be remotely activated at any time.