Xiaomi releases statement regarding Indian privacy concerns

After gaining immense popularity in India in a short time, Xiaomi has come under fire regarding security issues and concerns over user data being sent to China. The relations between the two countries aren't 100% peachy, so it's no wonder organizations such as the IAF or the Indian Air Force are concerned about the data being used to spy upon Indians.

Moreover, the claim of the data being sent to Chinese servers was recently confirmed by F-Secure, especially concerning the budget Redmi 1S that was recently launched in India for around $98, causing the IAF to outright ask its personnel and their families to stop buying and using the phone.

Xiaomi has now come out and released a statement regarding the privacy concerns surrounding its phones. The statement makes five key points.

First, the Xiaomi services are opt-in and won't activate without the user permission.

Second, Xiaomi does not collect user data without the explicit permission of the user. The users can choose to disable these services later if they want, which deletes their data.

Third, all data is heavily encrypted and securely stored. Not even Xiaomi employees can decrypt the data even if they get access to the hard drives.

Fourth, Xiaomi is moving data of Indian users outside of Beijing data centers to Amazon AWS data centers in Singapore and the USA. The migration was started earlier this year, parts of which will be finished by the end of October and all of it by the end of 2014. In 2015, Xiaomi will set up a data center in India for its Indian users.

Fifth, Xiaomi claims to have addressed the concerns raised by F-Secure regarding the Redmi 1S, which F-Secure has directly acknowledged four days later.

Hugo Barra also posted about the matter on Google+ and talked about the migration of data from servers outside of China and eventually to India.

Xiaomi hopes this should put all the concerns to rest. Other than the government authorities, most consumers weren't really concerned anyway, but this should take care of the remaining concerns.