It has been a rough couple of weeks for OnePlus. The company recently discovered a credit card hack on its website that potentially affected 40,000 customers. Then a story started making the rounds that OnePlus identifies and then uploads clipboard data like bank account numbers to a Chinese server. OnePlus has denied this outright and explained why some might be thinking that it could be doing this.
This misunderstanding apparently stems from a file in the OxygenOS beta called badwords.txt. It includes words like Chairman, Vice President, Private Messaging, etc. The allegation was that OnePlus uses this file to identify what data is to be uploaded from the Clipboard app to the server in China.
This would be very wrong had it turned out to be true. OnePlus was quick to issue a denial. It explains that badwords.txt is actually a blacklist file, it informs the operating system to not monitor matching data for its smart clipboard service.
OnePlus users outside China will not be familiar with this feature because it only exists in HydrogenOS, the operating system that the company only uses in China.
“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,” the company said in its official statement.
The only mistake OnePlus seems to have made here is including files from HydrogenOS into the OxygenOS beta. The code remains inactive so it doesn’t do anything, but it’s confusing and leads to misunderstandings like these.
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