It’s been a long time since Barnes & Noble made their own Nooks. This year, they have been selling and heavily promoting a $50 tablet that has been very well-reviewed. Part of the reason it was so cheap is they found someone cheaper than Samsung (who had been making the recent Nooks) to design it. Fast, small, and well designed with almost pure Android, it looked like it was a far better deal than the Amazon Kindle Fire.
Turns out that’s too good to be true. LinuxJournal reports that the Nook has ADUPS running, a malware suite that copies all your personal info (location, call logs, texts) to servers in China.
There’s already a lot less privacy in this digital era, but at least when we sign up for AppleID, Amazon, Google, or a Microsoft account we know what we’re getting into and who is getting it. This third party harvesting is the exact sort of thing you should be concerned about, particularly for your kids.
If you bought one of these for someone for the holidays, return it, ASAP.
Any word on other brands affected? I got my kid a cheap tablet that I’m pretty sure came from China, but it’s not associated with Nook or anything– I figured the cheapness WOULD show up in some way but it’s just my kid’s gaming tablet so he’ll have to deal, but if it’s a more SERIOUS problem…?
I’m afraid I cannot find that information.
Jee-sus! As soon as I saw the ad with the low price tag last week my eyes popped out. Then I decided $50 was still too precious to me. Phew! Is the NSA working on this?
If this is true it is very upsetting that the vendor, Barnes and Noble in this instance, did not do enough testing and due diligence to protect its customers. I wonder what the contract between B&N and the manufacturer in China says?
This article is half-true. The devices that went on sale Nov. 25 at B&N have an updated version of ADUPS that doesn’t collect user data. There’s an update coming that will remove ADUPS from devices altogether. No need for pitchforks and torches.
Have you a source?