Is Realme under government scanner for collecting user data?

Just days after CEO Madhav Seth exited Realme, the company seems to have come under the government’s lens for capturing users’ personal data such as call logs, location info, SMS and more. Responding to a tweet claiming that Realme’s ‘Enhanced Intelligent Services’ captures users’ personal information and has been activated by default, Rajeev Chandrasekhar, Minister of State for IT & Electronics, tweeted that this would be checked. He also tagged the Ministry of Electronics & IT’s official Twitter handle in this tweet.

A tweet by Rishi Bagree stated, “Realme’s smartphone has a feature (Enhanced Intelligent Services) that captures the user’s data (call logs, SMS, and location info) and it is ‘On’ by default. You can only see this ‘on’ by default feature when you go to Settings -> Additional Settings -> System Services -> Enhanced Intelligent Services. Indian users are kept in the dark to share their data without their consent. This is basically forced consent since it’s on by default. Is this data being sent to China?”

This service feature is hidden deep under settings and most users are not even aware of something of it. But the tweet was followed by some other users complaining of a similar feature being spotted in OnePlus devices as well. BBK Electronics Corporation is the parent company of Oppo, Vivo, and Realme. And OnePlus is Oppo’s subsidiary.

Realme is popular in India, and has a market share close to 14.5% here.

This isn’t the first time that a Chinese smartphone maker is being accused of collecting user data. For instance, the US barred companies in that country from doing business with Huawei, which once dominated the smartphone industry and equipment segment, in 2019 due to national security concerns about the Chinese firm supplying equipment for network infrastructure (particularly as the US undergoes its ongoing rollout of 5G).
 

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