Xiaomi Smartphones a Security Threat, says Indian Air Force

The Indian Air Force (IAF) has now started advising its personnel and their families against using Xiaomi smartphones, according to a report by the Sunday Standard.

According to the IAF's allegations, Xiaomi's smartphones and notebooks have been found to send users' private data to servers in Beijing. However, this claim is odd as Xiaomi does not have laptops in its range of products yet.

The IAF, according to the report, advised its personnel against using Xiaomi's products based on information obtained from the Indian Computer Response Team, which has also confirmed that the smartphones send back data to China.

This is not the first time the Chinese company has faced such allegations. In the past, there were claims that Xiaomi phones were pre-loaded with software to spy on its users. However, Xiaomi in turn, assured its users that the information was misleading. To counter these allegations, the company recently shifted out some smartphone data out of China.

According to Hugo Barra's blog post on Google+, data from non-Chinese users will be moved to Amazon servers in the United States, apart from data centres in Singapore.

The Sunday Standard report also mentions F-secure's findings that Xiaomi phones were forwarding information to Beijing. However, it does not take into account a more recent report by F-secure, which notes that these security flaws have been plugged.

Recently, Xiaomi said that its Mi Cloud service was enabled by default and then it made amends by releasing a software update that turned off the service by default, thus making it an opt-in feature that users will have to activate manually.