It's easy (and fun) to manufacture a controversy, especially when it's about a company with a past that thrived on controversy to begin with. I'm talking about OnePlus of course, and before you decide you've heard enough about OnePlus this week I'll urge you to stop, take a few minutes and read just one more thing. I recently wrote an article that parrots the thoughts of a lot of folks by saying not to buy a phone from OnePlus right now because of all the privacy and user data-handling concerns that seem to have surrounded the company lately. A credit card breach, some user data moving out of the phone and into the internet, and a clipboard that was being monitored by another app was just too much to swallow in such a short time and from just one company. We deserve better. Drama and smartphones go hand-in-hand on the internet. No company likes seeing those kinds of words written about it, especially when its side of the story isn't nearly as worrying and isn't getting out past all the noise the internet is so good at making. And I include myself and Android Central here — we make our fair share of noise whenever we think some noise needs to be made. In any case, OnePlus reached out to me and after a friendly and informative chat, I've realized a few things: not everything can be taken at face value; transparency is important; and blowing things out of proportion is awfully easy to do when an army of people are willing to do it. Verizon is offering the Pixel 4a for just $10/mo on new Unlimited lines Pointing a finger is easy, too. I can point one at myself and say I should have heard out OnePlus before I took to the keyboard, I can point one at all of us and say we make up our minds and tune out anything that doesn't match up with our narrative, and I can point one at OnePlus to say that all this could be avoided if it were more transparent and got in front of it all with a candid statement from the top.

It's not my place to make you feel at ease regarding privacy concerns with OnePlus. It is my place to explain my issues and why I feel differently today. After reading through a mountain of forum posts, tweets, obscure articles and subsequent retractions, it looks like OnePlus fell victim to what the internet is good at — getting outraged, then moving on when the next thing caught our attention. A big part of it is human nature. Juicy gossip is more interesting to read and share than the boring follow-up that clears the air. To that end, articles and forum threads about OnePlus stealing data or credit card numbers (both are absolutely false) get passed around a lot more than the explanation or retractions to those articles. I can say that the two biggest issues I had were about the way the clipboard was monitoring what users were typing, and how long it took for OnePlus to respond once it realized their payment system had been breached. Turns out that the clipboard thing is part misunderstanding, part fabrication and part signal-to-noise ratio. It's done to be helpful, and users in China are faced with one company's app blocking URLs to another company's content — just like OnePlus claimed it was and nobody listened because it did not get the message out. And I've been assured that the investigation into the credit card data breach is still in full force, was a priority since it was exposed, and even if the message didn't make it through, OnePlus did what was necessary to make sure no more financial data was getting mishandled as soon as the breach came to light.