Xiaomi battles spying accusations; fans still pile up to buy handsets
Xiaomi has been in the news recently and the news is ain’t good. Xiaomi has been accused of spying because the Redmi 1S handsets were found sending the user’s information back to the Chinese servers without consent.
The Indian Air Force also had issued an alert that the Chinese handsets are sending data to the servers in Beijing without the consent of the user.
However, Xiaomi has commented that the alert from the IAF was based on an old security test performed by F-Secure, in the July-August period, prior to the update patch from Xiaomi to resolve the problem. Xiaomi has also planned to shift the data servers to India in 2015 after the security issue.
The news about the security threats and spying allegations on Xiaomi are serious. However, the Indian smartphone consumer in the budget segment doesn’t seem to worry about the security threat. According to data posted by Flipkart, the Redmi 1S flash sale for 28th October shows a whopping 250,000 people already registered to get a handset each.
The common man seems to be undaunted about the security issues with the handset as he or she does not have any sensitive data to store on the handset.
In other words, those who are bothered with data security on their handsets are the ones who will either ensure there is nothing sensitive in there or opt for highly secure expensive smartphone anyways.
Sending data out to the servers from the handset is a known feature. Google, Apple, Microsoft and various other operating system and services are linked to your ID and smartphones to store data as a backup option. While some operating systems do it by default, others need you to enable this feature. Xiaomi has taken care of the issue and has set the options to the user’s preference where he can opt in if needed.
The Xiaomi Redmi 1S is a low-budget Android-based smartphone with a quad-core processor and an 8MP camera. The Chinese handset is powered by a custom-tweaked operating system called MIUI, based on the Google Android operating system. MIUI has their own services for the device which include cloud storage, data management, address book, email services and app markets. In order to use the services, you need to register a free account with Xiaomi and opt in if, only you want to share your data accordingly.
