OnePlus is coming in the news for many positive things from past two years. Now talking about some OnePlus news which was very negative for the company, the benchmarking cheating is the 1st news which comes in the tech savvy’s mind. If you recall OnePlus did benchmarking cheating with their last two devices, OnePlus 3T and OnePlus 5. Now OnePlus is back with another misleading case with the users.
This time it’s not about benchmarking cheating, it’s about the user privacy. According to this new research by Chris D Moore, OnePlus is secretly stealing our personal data and transferring it to a US based Amazon server. As of now, Chris has only found this security thread in his OnePlus 2, but he believes that all OnePlus is taking data from all OnePlus devices. This data includes information like IMEI number, mobile network name, MAC address, Wi-Fi SSIDs, and a serial number of the phone. Also, the stamps of opening & closing any app are also being sent to the server. We aren’t going much deeper into this, but if you want to dig more, head over to the source link below.
Now coming to the solution for this thread, there are two methods through which we can control the data transfer. 1st method is running adb command to disable the ‘OnePlus System Service’, which sends the data to the server. If you want to go through this process, then head over to the source link below. The 2nd method doesn’t require any root. Just go to settings – advanced – turn-off the ‘Join User Experience Programme’.
According to OnePlus they send our data for security reasons to those US based Amazon server. They do this via two different streams through HTTPS to Amazon server. 1st stream sends the usage analytics data to improve our software experience via software updates. 2nd stream sends the device information, which is used for better after sales services. The Non-root method given above can disable the 1st stream, while Root method can disable the 2nd stream too.
So that’s all the information we have as of now. Many bloggers including myself think that maybe many more OEMs also do the same. Maybe other OEMs too takes our personal data to improve our user’s experience. But as of now let’s talk about OnePlus only, and I seriously thinks that OnePlus should add an option to disable 2nd stream too. What are your thoughts on this security thread? If you are not a OnePlus user, do you think your phone OEM also do the same? Do let us know in the comments below. Also, stay tuned with us for more information.
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Source: Chris D Moore
