UPDATE: BLU reached out to us with the following statement on this situation:
"Since Nov 2016 when the initial privacy concern was reported by Kryptowire, which BLU quickly remedied, Amazon has been aware of the Adups and other applications on our BLU devices which were deemed at the time by BLU, Amazon, and Kryptowire to pose no further security or privacy risk. Now almost a year later, the devices are still behaving in the same exact way, with standard and basic data collection that pose no security or privacy risk. There has been absolutely no new behavior or change in any of our devices to trigger any concern. We expect Amazon to understand this, and quickly reinstate our devices for sale.”
ORIGINAL: Last year, some phones from BLU Products were found to be transmitting some of their contents to Chinese servers. The company cleaned up the software that was transmitting that info shortly after, but now BLU is in the spotlight for a similar issue.
Amazon has suspended sales of BLU phones over a “potential security issue.” A report came out last week that suggested that select BLU devices have been sending user data like call logs, cellular location, and IMEI to Chinese servers.
Amazon issued a full statement to CNET on this latest situation:
"Because security and privacy of our customers is of the utmost importance, all BLU phone models have been made unavailable for purchase on Amazon.com until the issue is resolved.”
Having its devices pulled from Amazon is bad news for BLU for a couple of reasons. Not only is the company associated with another privacy issue, but it’s missing out on some potential sales because its phones are on Amazon’s virtual shelves. Now we’ll just have to wait and see how BLU responds.
