15 November

If you want to know whether the software that came installed on your phone sends out your data, our searches on 8 November 2026 found no instructions for ordinary users and no official guidance on phones in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore or Japan; the related notices we found, such as a November 2025 Singapore Police Force advisory, cover non-certified TV streaming devices. In a statement on 15 November 2016, the security firm Kryptowire wrote that some Android phones sold through US online retailers, including the R1 HD from the US phone brand BLU, shipped with update software from the Shanghai company Adups that sent the full text of messages and call logs to a server in Shanghai every 72 hours, without disclosure or consent. A lawyer for Adups told The New York Times that the transmission feature was built at the request of a Chinese client for customer support and spam blocking and that its presence on BLU phones was a mistake (as relayed by Fortune, TechCrunch and CyberScoop), while CyberScoop's report at the time said the purpose of the collection remained unclear. CyberScoop reported the figure BLU gave the Times as about 120,000 affected phones, TechCrunch relayed Adups's claim to have deleted the data collected by accident, and Fortune reported that Google did not know how widely Adups had distributed the software and that it was unclear whether other manufacturers were affected. You can see your phone's Play Protect certification status under About in the Play Store settings and, if it shows as uncertified, compare your model against the certified-device list on Google's help page, but certification means only that a device passed Android compatibility testing and does not show that its preinstalled software sends no data out.