Sony says Xperia smartphones are not spying

With the recent outburst of smartphones spying on the user’s data, Xiaomi has been under the scrutiny. However, Sony was also not spared—news about Sony’s recent Xperia smartphones spying on the user’s data and sending it to China servers was broken.

Users on various forums, including Sony’s own customer support forums and Reddit, Sony Xperia owners claimed that the smartphone had a folder being created on its own. The folder ‘Baidu’ was automatically created by the smartphone app, allegedly ‘My Xperia’, was linking to the Chinese cloud services called Baidu. Users were terrified about the strange folder showing up on its own even though they have not installed a single third-party application.

Also Read: After Xiaomi, Sony also accused of data theft

Spying accusations is no joke—in fact, it can bring the company into government surveillance and the affect on the brand name is tremendous. Sony has been struggling to keep themselves high in the smartphone market and the spying is the last thing they would wan to be accused of. In the recent years, Sony had also been accused of spying on individual music listening habits by installing an un-installable rootkit on the user’s PC. This data was being sent back to the Sony servers.

Now with the new accusation on Sony spying on user data via the Chinese servers is a cause of threat to the existing well-known brand.

Sony came out to defend itself and has said “In India, we have specially designed interface for Indian customers and no such incident has been reported so far. With the customized interface, we believe that there is zero probability of any such incident happening in India.”

On the Sony forums, Rickard, the Sony support team member clarified the user’s queries by stating “I’ve had some further feedback from the guys in our development team. I can confirm that Xperia phones don’t store any user data for transmission to Baidu. The MyXperia app supports both Google Cloud Messaging service and the Baidu Push Notification framework, as do many third party apps, to make sure we can support our China customers as well as those in the rest of the world. Both get automatically initialised when you first activate MyXperia. The IP activity you are seeing is just linked to Baidu’s push notification system, which is an expected behaviour for this application.”     

Users on the forum have also appealed that Sony should keep the China services enabled or included only for phones sold in the Chinese region and not world-wide. We hope Sony addresses these issues and solves the problem with a new update at the earliest. For now, it is suggested that users should not activate My Xperia services if you are not confident about the background activities.

Sony is assuring that their user's data is safe and is not being misused. For further clarifications, you could log on to the Sony Support Forums and request a query.