… the tip of the iceberg in a closed source phone.
CCP Inc. could easily improve the cloaking of this misfeature so that security researchers don’t discover it.
I would like to see the EU ban locked bootloaders so that you have half a chance of not having to throw your Xiaomi mobile away and instead you can put an open source operating system on it. (In saying this, I do not know whether this particular offending handset is locked or not locked.)