New Delhi:  IAF personnel and their families have been asked not to use Chinese ‘Xiaomi Redmi 1s’ phones on the grounds that data was allegedly transferred to their servers in China and it could be a security risk. Xiaomi made its entry in Indian smartphone market with Mi3 smartphone in july. Its new smartphone Mi3 handset was sold like hot cakes on flipkart. After just six weeks of its collections, it discontinued its sales and came up with the much cheaper RedMi 1s smartphone in September.

Donot To Use Chinese Xiaomi Phones:

“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 says to its personals.

The note, issued some weeks ago, has been prepared by the intelligence unit based on the inputs from Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In), according to IAF sources. Emails were sent by PTI to the company for its response on this development but those remained unanswered. However, in a general statement two days back, the company had said it was fully committed to storing its users’ data securely at all times. The company said it is migrating some data on non-Chinese customers away from its servers in Beijing due to performance and privacy considerations. 

Every Internet company and telecom operator in China, both foreign and domestic, is held legally liable for all content shared through their platforms. Currently Xiaomi is looking into the matter since India is a major market. We will keep you posted on any further development.

The company said it is migrating some data on non-Chinese customers away from its servers in Beijing due to performance and privacy considerations. It said that earlier this year, its e-commerce engineering teams started migrating its global e-commerce platforms and user data for all international users from their Beijing data centers to Amazon AWS data centers in California (USA) and Singapore. This migration process will be completed by the end of October and will benefit users in all of our international markets – Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, and Taiwan.

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.

Response from Xiaomi:

The Indian Air Force circular to their personnel advising them not to use devices manufactured by Xiaomi. I would really like to clarify a few key points.
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.