Smartphone company tracking users’ personal data

Chinese smartphone OnePlus is reportedly tracking excessive amount of user’s personal data and sending it to its personal servers.

The Shenzhen based Chinese smartphone company’s OxygenOS is tracking personal identifiable information including IMEI numbers, mobile network names, phone’s serial number and Wi-Fi SSIDs.

The information about the tracking was revealed by an OnePlus 2 user Chris D Moore who installed a security application that tracks the inflow and outflow of device’s data. He noticed a glitch that the device was making traffic requests to open.oneplus.net, which directed traffic to US-based Amazon AWS server, informed Business Today.

And I'm _definitely_ not convinced you should know how long I spend in which apps. pic.twitter.com/1tX3vjW9fu

— Christopher Moore (@chrisdcmoore) January 13, 2017

Moore informed that the device was also tracking the locks and unlocks of the phone and the screen on/off time. According to reports, all of the firm’s OnePlus devices including OnePlus 2, OnePlus 3T and OnePlus 5 were going through with the same issue.

As per WCCF Tech, Moore claimed, “In my case, these services had sent 16MB of data in approximately 10 hours.”

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Justifying itself, the Chinese organization stated, “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.”

Though the company claims that this is for better after-sales support, users are not much satisfied about their information being tracked. However, the company has not yet talked about any plans to fix this issue in its upcoming updates.

The data that the company is collecting includes: IMEI numbers, phone numbers, MAC addresses, IMSI prefixes, serial numbers, mobile network name(s), when user launched/closed an app, screen on/off, time when user locked or unlocked their phone, and such more data that is considered invasive.