Since some days Xiaomi has been in the press for all the bad reasons. Recently Indian Air Force(IAF) has advised its members to avoid Xiaomi smartphones for security and privacy reasons.
Earlier a report from F Secure claimed that Xiaomi collects and sends users data to china. Xiaomi said that they provide Mi Cloud service which basically stores data to their secured data centers. Later Xiaomi made the service optional and only stores data if users opts for the service.
But Xiaomi claims that IAF has issued the circular on previous reports because after they made the service optional, F Secure confirmed that data is not sent to china without user permission.
Now, Hugo Barra, Xiaomi Global VP, through Facebook post has said that they will be moving Indian users data to local data centers in India from 2015. Xiaomi also says that they have moved Indian users data out of china and shifted data to Amazon AWS data centers located in Singapore and USA.
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. Parts of this migration will be completed by the end of October, and all of it will be completed by the end of 2014. In 2015, we plan to launch a local data center in India to serve the needs of (and store data for) our Indian users.
These efforts help significantly improve the performance of our services and also provide some peace of mind for users in India, ensuring that we treat their data with utmost care and the highest privacy standards.
It will be interesting to see if IAF pulls the circular or not. Well its good that Xiaomi is listening and addressing user concerns.