Indian Air Force warns about the threat with Xiaomi Smartphones

The so called Chinese Apple, Xiaomi the beast of the budget phones which was introduced a few months ago in India have been accused a threat by Indian Air Force(IAF) earlier this week. It was found that the smartphones made by Xiaomi are sending user data to servers in China.

F-Secure, the major security software maker have already warned earlier than everyone that the Xiaomi phones were sending information like carrier name, phone number, IMEI, contacts and text messages back to Beijing.

"Next we connected to and logged into Mi Cloud, the iCloud-like service from Xiaomi. Then we repeated the same test steps as before. This time, the IMSI details were sent to api.account.xiaomi.com, as well as the IMEI and phone number," says F-Secure in an article.

It makes it much worse if any of the family members of those who are working in defense and research are spied and the information thereby used can be vulnerable to the national security.

Hugo Barra, the vice-president of International business activities of Xiaomi quickly responds to the IAF’s accusation of the threat and writes about the situation in a detailed status update on his Google plus profile. He says that it is just a migration of e-commerce and MIUI services to expand the user’s usability.

“In 2015, we are planning to take on a new challenge to further improve the performance of our services for users in large and fast-growing markets such as India and Brazil. 

In these markets, where Amazon AWS services aren't yet available, we will be working with local data center providers to set up our service infrastructure.  Once that has been completed, users in these markets will be much closer to their data and enjoy even faster speeds by connecting to local servers.” says Hugo Barra in his status update.

However, I feel that there is a point in IAF’s accusation about the threat. The recent attacks on iCloud accounts in China and the government’s interfering nature in such user privacy issues locally, makes the point much bolder and stronger.

Let’s see how far Xiaomi takes it. Because Indians will believe IAF rather than Xiaomi. What do you say?

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