If you are using a OnePlus smartphone, you may not be aware that the phone manufacturer is quietly collecting a lot of personal information about you that you may not wish to otherwise disclose. This was discovered by Christopher Moore, a software engineer and he has shared the complete technical details in a blog he wrote.
According to him, the personal data that OnePlus is capturing includes, among others, IMEI numbers, MAC addresses, mobile network names and IMSI prefixes. These amount to a huge volume of data and the reason given by OnePlus for this practice is to collect the data and through analysis find out any bugs in its devices for future corrections.
Using his technical acumen, this software engineer tracked the flow of incoming and outgoing traffic from his mobile phone for a considerable period of time. He found that the domain open.oneplus.net to which these data were being uploaded from his phone was an Amazon AWS site owned by OnePlus.
Having collected all these details, the software engineer wrote to the company and OnePlus responded by saying that they are indeed collecting usage analytics data as well as device information. However, they claimed that the data analytics is put to use in order to finetune their software to match the user behavior and the other stream is meant to offer better after-sales-service to their customers.
OnePlus further added that if the user does not want the data to be flowing out of the phone, then there is an option for stopping it within the ‘Settings’ in the phone.
There are other ways to stop this data transmission completely by connecting the mobile to a PC and use the ADB utility app to remove the domain from the list, thereby virtually blocking any transmission to the site from your phone.