OnePlus accused of collecting private data from users; this is what the company has to say

OnePlus was reportedly accused for collecting analytics data from its users. Software engineer Christopher Moore said in a blog post that the company was collecting personal data including the smartphone’s IMEI, phone numbers, MAC addresses, mobile network names, phone’s serial number and wireless network’s ESSID and BSSID.

Now, the company has responded to these claims. According to Android Police, the company said, “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.”

Additionally, Twitter user Jakub Czekanski seemed to have found a fix to permanently disable the data transmission as well. He said, “I’ve read your article about OnePlus Analytics. Actually, you can disable it permanently: pm uninstall -k –user 0 pkg.”