90 by 2: Is Xiaomi secretly sending data to Chinese servers?

Wednesday, December 31, 2014

Is Xiaomi secretly sending data to Chinese servers?

There is lots of News that Xiaomi secretly sending data to Chinese servers or this phone so cheap because its design for data hacking.

This issue raised higher concerns across many countries, proactively in India, Singapore and Taiwan. The Indian Air Force (IAF) — among the largest in the world — warned its employees and their belongings that their private information was being shipped over to servers in China, and asked them to avoid using Xiaomi smartphones due to security risk.

In a blogpost, Hugo Barra from Xiaomi denied all the allegations made by F-Secure.

“MIUI does not secretly upload photos and text messages. MIUI requests public data from Xiaomi servers from time to time. These include data such as preset greeting messages (thousands of jokes, holiday greetings and poems) in the Messaging app and MIUI OTA update notifications, i.e. all non-personal data that does not infringe on user privacy.” Barra said.

What you should do ?

Don't use Mi Cloud: Mi Cloud enables users to back up and manage personal information in the cloud, as well as sync to other devices. This includes contacts, notes, text messages and photos.Mi Cloud is turned off by default. Make sure you don't use this service.
Turn off User Experience Program: Mi phones have "User Experience Programs" setting which send anonymous data usage to Mi servers. Make sure you turn off this service.