Africa’s most popular phones have a tracking problem and explains where data disappears to

“Roughly one in two smartphones sold in Africa is made by a company most buyers have never heard of. Transsion, a Shenzhen-based manufacturer, owns the Tecno, Infinix and Itel brands, which together accounted for about 48% of African smartphone shipments in 2025 – more than 40 million of the 84.4 million handsets shipped on the continent last year, according to Omdia data. New research has decrypted what those phones send back to their maker.” Yes, one could say that most phones and software anyway report a lot of usage (metadata) back to other countries and developers e.g. WhatsApp even states this in their conditions that their users must accept. But these phone models go a lot deeper than that, first by baking it into the hardware, and secondly by collecting more granular data. Then there is also the issue of the users data packages being used to constantly transmit this data, even though it is not voice or video data. It is still eating away at users data where many can only…