After recently addressing the performance issues of Xiaomi Redmi 1S right before its 7th flash sale in India where 90,000 Redmi 1S was sold out in 11.9 seconds, the Chinese smartphone manufacturer faces yet another controversy.
Earlier last week, the Indian Air Force (IAF) warned their colleagues and families to refrain from using Xiaomi's mobile devices due to the phone allegedly "sending data to remote servers in China" without the user's knowledge and permission. It was also reported that the IAF has made allegations as well against Chinese mobile applications.
"F-secure, a leading security solution company, recently carried out a test of Xiaomi Redmi 1s, the company's budget smartphone, and found that the phone was forwarding carrier name, phone number, IMEI (the device identifier) plus numbers from address book and text messages back to Beijing," the IAF warning reads according to New Indian Express.
Incidentally, this was not the first time that Xiaomi has encountered such accusations as the Taiwanese government has also made similar comments against the said company. They have been investigating on whether Xiaomi is a "cyber security threat" and will release a statement in 3 months if they will still allow Xiaomi to sell its products in their country.
Meanwhile, here is what Xiaomi's VP for International Operations Hugo Barra has to say about this alarming concern as shared by NextBigWhat.com:
" Xiaomi does not collect any information without user permission.
We offer various Internet based services such as Mi Cloud and Cloud Messaging which require data to be stored in the cloud. We take rigorous precautions to ensure that all data is secured when uploaded to Xiaomi servers and is not stored beyond the time required. Users will always be notified beforehand in situations when we require your personal information, and will have to approve the request.
Mi Cloud and Cloud Messaging are opt-in services which users can turn on and off at any time, giving users complete control. Please see attached screenshots as examples.
The concerns raised by F-Secure have been fully addressed.
We believe the advisory circular issued by IAF is based on events about 2 months back. It refers to the F-Secure test done on the Redmi 1S in July 2014 about the activation of our Cloud Messaging service (which enables users to send text messages for free). We immediately addressed the concerns raised, which was directly acknowledged by F-Secure 4 days later.
We are currently moving our Indian users' data to servers outside of China.
Since early 2014, we have been migrating our services and corresponding data for Indian users from our Beijing data centers to Amazon AWS data centers in Singapore and USA. This migration will be fully completed by the end of the year.
This helps improve the performance of our services and also provide some peace of mind for users in India in ensuring that we treat their data with the utmost care and will always maintain the highest privacy standards."
Xiaomi has only started to tap the Indian market early this year but has already sold more or less 580,000 units of their mid-range smartphone Redmi 1S, not including the Mi3. The Chinese company is about to launch their latest flagship Mi4 by the end of this year or early 2015.
