I own a lenovo P780. I just received it the other week. It is my first Android device. Coming from the linux world (god rest your soul my precious N900) I was not ready to add all my usual user accounts and information till I was satisfied the thing was not spunking my data all over the place to god knows who.

So before getting 'into' the device I was installing xprivacy (permissions manager), afwall+ (firewall), catlog (logcat viewer), networklog (network I/O logger) and interceptor-ng (packet snooper).

First I set about removing some of the pre-installed bloat. In lenovo's defence there was not really any bloat as such. Despite removing some garbage I keep noticing in logcat a DNS request for 'fsr.lenovomm.com'. This irked me. What the hell was trying to call Lenovo? I then used networklog to determine what programs were responsible for this. It came quickly apparent that it was ALL of the inbuilt lenovo software. The dialer, contacts manager and battery settings program etc.

I then used interceptor-ng to look at the traffic.

Sonovvab****

Everytime I used a lenovo program, it would spam my information to 4 remote servers. One of them is addressed:



The information is being sent in clear text. It includes my IMEI, model information and a lot of other numbers that could well contain location and other metrics.

The only way to stop it while maintaining the functionality of the phone is to firewall ALL the lenovo programs. Browser, dialer, contacts, notes, messages and lenovo launcher. 'Just replace them' you say? I cannot. The phone is a dual sim device, I know of no other dialer/conacts that supports dual sims properly.

I now feel extremely paranoid. My N900 never pulled shit like this. All the programs came from a Debian repository and were HEAVILY vetted. There was no spyware on it because you could quite simply not get away with it. (except for Nokia cherry, but that is another story). Conversely, every damn program on my p780 wants to know my location and the contents of my sms/phonebook. On a PC I use a firewall to stop bullshit from connecting to me, on android I have to use a firewall to stop bullshit from dialing home at every opportunity.

root and install custom rom.

problem solved.

tricky bit - lenovo is so shite that no custom roms can be bothered to support it.