OnePlus again accused of data breach allegations

The Chinese smartphone manufacturer OnePlus is again accused of collecting user data from its Clipboard app. A French Security researcher named Elliot Anderson, discovered this breach from a file named ‘badwords.text’ in the Clipboard app of OnePlus. Elliot claims that the text file had various keywords, which indicates that the company is sending user’s data to its servers in China.

The file called “badwords.text” included several keywords such as Chairman, Vice President, Deputy Director, Associate Professor, Deputy Heads, General, Private Message, shipping, Address and email among others. The file also included a method to monitor bank accounts. Elliot claims this breached user data is being sent to a company called TeddyMobile and further, the data is allegedly transmitted without user’s permission.

Reacting to these claims the company responded, “There’s been a false claim that the Clipboard app has been sending user data to a server. The code is entirely inactive in the open beta for OxygenOS, our global operating system. No user data is being sent to any server without consent in OxygenOS,” said the company.

In addition to that, the company added, “In the open beta for HydrogenOS, our operating system for the China market, the identified folder exists in order to filter out what data to not upload. Local data in this folder is skipped over and not sent to any server.”

Further, this justification from the company isn't satisfactory since it recently acknowledged the data breach of 40,000 consumers, who bought products from the company's official website. Due to this breach, the company also disabled the credit card payment system on their website as of now.