Technology

Huawei Smartphones collect a lot of data from their users and send it to Huawei[1], and the founder of Huawei has very strong relations to the Chinese government[2].

[1] https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0279942 "On the data privacy practices of Android OEMs"
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren_Zhengfei "Ren Zhengfei [...] is the founder and CEO of Huawei Technologies [...]. He is a member of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)."

A company being employee owned is a very good sign, but mainly for worker treatment. Huawei is still not managed by all of its employees; a few people in upper management are tasked to represent the owners interest, and in that process, as per usual, morals get diluted.

You can see this by the facts that Huawei phones still violate user privacy by collecting copious amounts of data on them, or that Huawei knowingly supplies surveillance equipment to the CCP, that is used in areas where a lot of Uyghurs live and in the not-concentration-camps that reeducate Uyghurs .

Besides that, I also just came across "Huawei states it is an employee-owned company, but this remains a point of dispute" on their wikipedia article, which at a cursory look appears to have some good points against that statement behind it.
The paper about that is here https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3372669

In summary, we find the following:

• The Huawei operating company is 100% owned by a holding company, which is in turn approximately 1% owned by Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei and 99% owned by an entity called a “trade union committee” for the holding company.

• We know nothing about the internal governance procedures of the trade union committee. We do not know who the committee members or other trade union leaders are, or how they are selected.

• Trade union members have no right to assets held by a trade union.

• What have been called “employee shares” in “Huawei” are in fact at most contractual interests in a profit-sharing scheme.

• Given the public nature of trade unions in China, if the ownership stake of the trade union committee is genuine, and if the trade union and its committee function as trade unions generally function in China, then Huawei may be deemed effectively state-owned.

• Regardless of who, in a practical sense, owns and controls Huawei, it is clear that the employees do not.

So at every path we come to the same conclusion, the CCP will get your data, and about as much of it as google (and probably the US government) if you used their operating system and services.

Huawei is about as trustworthy as your average trillion dollar corporation, and about as devious with their whitewashing as all others too. Google is masquerading as pro-privacy, apple as pro-repair and pro-environment, and Huawei as pro-worker and state-independent, because they all aren't but would profit if they where perceived to be