OnePlus Betrays Customer Privacy, Quietly Collects Personal Data

Just when it was starting to rise in the ranks of smartphone greats, OnePlus falls a step with news of a grave betrayal. It turns out that the Chinese company has been collecting massive amounts of user data without telling anyone about it. Even worse is how the phone maker tried to make excuses for the grievous act by saying customers can turn off the analytics, which should have been the case by default.

As Engadget notes, OnePlus has been making a good case for itself among smartphone consumers due to its well-built, excellent devices. Unfortunately, it turns out that its own in-house Android OS called OxygenOS is equipped with data analytics that collects user data without consent.

What’s worse is that the data doesn’t even make the consumers anonymous, which puts them at an alarmingly huge risk of getting targeted. This is a fact that security research Chris Moore has apparently been trying to warn the public about for months, dating back in January when he put up a blog post about exactly this problem.

This privacy vulnerability recently gained renewed attention and it has been circulating the industry enough that OnePlus finally produced a statement. Unfortunately, the company’s words didn’t really inspire confidence. While providing justification for the unauthorized data collection as a means of fine-tuning its software and gathering after-sales information, the company confirmed that this part of the phone can’t be completely disabled.

“We securely transmit analytics in two different streams over HTTPS to an Amazon server. The first stream is usage analytics, which we collect in order for us to more precisely fine tune our software according to user behavior. This transmission of usage activity can be turned off by navigating to ‘Settings’ -> ‘Advanced’ -> ‘Join user experience program’. The second stream is device information, which we collect to provide better after-sales support,” the statement reads.