Last week, a Sony Xperia user found a ‘Baidu’ folder in his handset and that the ‘myXperia’ app was constantly pinging to servers located in China, which was termed as a spyware by many users on Reddit. 

Many users were also worried about the fact that their device was in constant connection with a server located in China.

Sony has now responded on this matter and cleared the whole issue. The company reassures its users that it does not send any data to Baidu servers and the activity being shown on their phone is related to Baidu push notification service used by the myXperia app.

“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.” — Rickard, Sony support

Right now, the myXperia app makes use of Google’s Cloud Messaging platform and Baidu’s push notification service irrespective of the user location and device variant.

Sony will fix this in a future update to the myXperia app and will optimise it so that the Baidu push notification service is activated only in the Mainland China variants of Xperia devices.