Xiaomi to set up data centre in India to address security concerns

Move follows Indian Air Force diktat to its personnel not to buy Xiaomi smartphones due to security concerns

 

Days after the Indian Air Force asked its personnel and their families not to buy Xiaomi smartphones because of security concerns, the Chinese smartphone maker said on Monday that it would set up a data centre in India next year to store local user data.

Xiaomi, which started selling phones in India in July this year, has already sold about 400,000 handsets in the country through Flipkart. The firm also said it was ”attempting to reach Indian authorities to learn specifics”.  

“Since early 2014, we have been migrating our services and corresponding data for Indian users from our Beijing data centres to Amazon’s data centres in Singapore and the US. 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 centre in India to serve the needs of (and store data for) our Indian users,” Xiaomi said in a statement on Monday.

The company added that the efforts were to “significantly improve” the performance of its services as well as to allay any concerns that users in India might have. “We treat their data with utmost care and the highest privacy standards,” it noted.  Xiaomi has faced privacy controversies in Taiwan, too.

In its statement, Xiaomi said it dies not collect any data associated with services such as Mi Cloud and Cloud Messaging until the user provides "explicit consent" by turning on the corresponding service(s). However, users can turn off the service at any point of time.

According to Xiaomi, the company encrypts all user data which cannot be decrypted even by Xiaomi employees. "We take rigorous precautions to ensure that all data is secured when uploaded to Xiaomi servers and is not stored beyond the time required," it added.