OnePlus had been accused of sending Clipboard data taken from OnePlus phones in the latest OxygenOS Beta version to China and has now denied the accusations, saying that the file is inactive and created for Chinese phones only.
The information was first revealed by Elliot Alderson on Twitter, where he explained how the application works.
He posted that a strange file called badword.txt existed in the clipboard application, along with 6 others, for the OxygenOS Beta update which could identify what kind of data the user copied to their clipboard and send sensitive data such as bank information and passwords to a Chinese server, allegedly pointing to a Chinese company called Teddy Mobile.
OnePlus has since denied this accusation and released a statement saying that "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."
They added that the identified folder exists in the open beta for HydrogenOS, their operating system for China exclusively, in order to filter out what data to not upload and that local data in this folder is skipped over and not sent to any server.