The smartphone market is massive. Sure, most of us are aware of Samsung and Apple as the big players, but this does not mean that we exclude OnePlus, OPPO, Xiaomi, and many other Chinese smartphone manufacturers who are constantly innovating and bringing new and powerful phones into the market. However, the latest research from the University of Edinburgh and Trinity College Dublin shows some concerns about Chinese smartphones.

OnePlus, OPPO, Xiaomi, and Realme phones in China collect and send a lot of user data without consent

According to the research, phones from OnePlus, OPPO, Xiaomi, and Realme come preinstalled with a lot of system/vendor apps that are often in access to a lot of permissions that are enabled by default - this is the first red flag because these permissions have to be granted to the app by the user.

The apps found on the OnePlus, OPPO, and Xiaomi phones are responsible for a lot of questionable activity, such as collecting and sending sensitive information found on the device. Some notable information includes device location, user profile, social relationships, device identifiers, app usage patterns, SMS history, and contact numbers. All of this is being done even if the user decides not to grant the permissions, and as expected, there's no information about the data being collected. The scariest part is that it would not take rocket science to decrypt this data and figure out the user to whom the data belongs.

This is not surprising since such incidents have happened in the past. However, an important part of the research highlights that the research was conducted on mobile devices that were sold in China, which automatically exempts the international consumers of the same devices, but considering it has happened before, we wouldn't be surprised if international variants of these phones are sharing the same fate.

You can read the research here.