Ren Zhengfei told the world no Chinese law forces companies to install backdoors. He's technically correct — the law doesn't use the word "backdoor." It uses "support, assist, and cooperate with national intelligence efforts." NYU professor Jerome Cohen: "There is no way Huawei can resist any order from Beijing. The Party is embedded in Huawei and controls it." The law Ren says doesn't exist compels something potentially much broader than a backdoor.
critical
Huawei says it never conceals backdoors. The UK government spent nine years trying to verify Huawei's code and concluded it was "impossible to provide end-to-end assurance." Vodafone found backdoors in Huawei routers in Italy. They asked Huawei to remove them. Huawei agreed, hid them instead, then refused to take them out — calling it a "manufacturing requirement." A security professor confirmed: removed on complaint, then added back differently. That's not a bug. That's concealment.
critical
Huawei said it only makes "general-purpose products." It tested a system that scans crowds for Uyghur faces and alerts police. They filed a patent classifying humans by ethnicity: "Han" or "Uyghur." The document was on Huawei's own website until journalists found it. You don't patent a test. Up to two million Uyghurs sit in internment camps. The World Uyghur Congress is suing Huawei for genocide. French soccer star Antoine Griezmann quit his sponsorship. "General-purpose" apparently includes ethnic sorting for police.
Huawei says your health data is encrypted on your phone and they can't access it. But the app needs internet access and syncs your data to Huawei's cloud servers. Chinese law requires Huawei to hand over data to intelligence agencies if asked. So your heart rate, sleep, and location data may end up accessible to the Chinese government despite Huawei's encryption claims.
critical
Five countries banned Huawei from building phone networks because they couldn't trust the company with communications data. Yet the same company freely sells smartwatches that track your heart rate, blood oxygen, sleep, stress, location, and menstrual cycle — data that is far more personal than anything flowing through a cell tower. If Huawei can't be trusted with network infrastructure, why is it trusted with your most intimate biometric data?
critical
Huawei's privacy policy claims it doesn't collect biometric data. But the Huawei Health app literally requests permission to access body sensors around the clock, and the Watch GT 4 continuously records your heart rate, blood oxygen, skin temperature, and more. The company claims it doesn't collect the exact data its own watch and app are designed to collect.