Recently, we came across a news that Chinese smartphone manufacturer OnePlus has been collecting specific user data of its customers. This includes details like IMEI numbers, mobile network names, IMSI prefixes, MAC address and serial numbers, among others. All these data requests were made by open.oneplus.net. The company immediately responded with a statement, saying the data is transmitted securely and is used to fine-tune their software according to user behavior.
Further, OnePlus also provided users a way through which this data sharing can be turned off. However, co-founder Carl Pei has published a post where he has addressed some of the key concerns raised during the matter and how the information collected has never been shared with third-parties.
“By the end of October, all OnePlus phones running OxygenOS will have a prompt in the setup wizard that asks users if they want to join our user experience program. The setup wizard will clearly indicate that the program collects usage analytics. In addition, we will include a terms of service agreement that further explains our analytics collection. We would also like to share we will no longer be collecting telephone numbers, MAC Addresses and WiFi information,” Pei wrote on his OnePlus forum.
Stressing on keeping personal information of the users safe and private, Pei also mentioned that while the company collected some device-specific information in order to help provide better after-sales support, none of the information had been shared with external parties.
As reported earlier, this is not the first time OnePlus has come into the scanner for violating users data. Recently, OnePlus was also cheating in synthetic benchmarks to scores. OnePlus 3T powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon 821 SoC was forced to run at higher clock speed whenever a benchmarking app was detected. However, OnePlus is not the only one in not caring about users privacy, Xiaomi, Oppo and Vivo, among others were also caught sending private user data to Chinese servers in every 72 hours.
BGR
