Huawei founder and CEO Ren Zhengfei speaks to the Financial Times (via CNBC)
Huawei is looking at Apple as a role model for its own privacy policies.
On data sharing:
“We will never do such a thing. If I had done it even once, the US would have evidence to spread around the world. Then the 170 countries and regions in which we currently operate would stop buying our products, and our company would collapse.
“After that, who would pay the debts we owe? Our employees are all very competent, so they would resign and start their own companies, leaving me alone to pay off our debts. I would rather die.
“Data is owned by our customers, not us. Carriers have to track every user, otherwise no phone calls could be made. It’s a carrier’s duty to track user data. We, as an equipment provider, don’t track any data.
“I don’t know why the US government micromanages its tech companies as much as they do,” he says. “They act like a mother-in-law, and if they get too involved, their daughters-in-law might run off.”
Elsewhere, the Huawei CEO claimed the operating system the company is developing (HongMeng OS, also known as Ark OS) may run faster than Android.
But…
“Key mid-level technical personnel employed by Huawei have strong backgrounds in work closely associated with intelligence gathering and military activities.” Some employees can be linked “to specific instances of hacking or industrial espionage conducted against Western firms,” [a research paper] claimed.
MacDailyNews Take: It’s oddly compelling to imagine a low-cost yet private OS to provide a route into the light for Android users – we’re just not entirely convinced Huawei will introduce it…
“Data is owned by our customers, not us.”
That doesn’t seem like the proper Chinese (government) attitude.
Uh-huh. And there was no massacre at Tiananmen Square, according to the Chinese internet. Whatever, China.