Reasons you should not buy a Xiaomi Smartphone !

You will be familiar with Xiaomi phones, in case even though you haven't used it you would have seen a lot of people specifically the people who use low or mid range phones using Xiaomi. You would think that why am I saying you shouldn't buy a Xiaomi Phone, so here are some reasons:

Xiaomi Note 8

1. DATA COLLECTION IN INCOGNITO MODE

In early 2020, two researchers namely Andrew and Gabriel claimed that the web browser of Xiaomi Redmi Note 8 collect more data than usual that too in Incognito Mode in which normal browsers usually do not collect data.

Not only this but the swipe you make, which folder you open at what time, the notifications you get, etc. data was also collected which is a very concerning for a user. 

The same test was conducted on a MI 10 and Redmi K20 and the result were same. It is obvious that if a browser collects data it will send it on servers and yes it was true. Normally when a browser sends data to its servers it sends it in an encrypted format. There are different types of encryption which varies from easy to very hard level. But in case of Xiaomi the encryption format was very easy to decrypt so the data of the users was at a heavy risk. After this Xiaomi updated their browser and gave a toggle in it of whether to send the data or not. 

2. ADS IN USER INTERFACE

Another major problem which Xiaomi smartphones is that we have to see ads in UI which is not acceptable. The reason that Xiaomi puts ads in UI is they hardly earn more than 5% on the sale of their hardware i.e., when they sell a smartphone they doesn't make more than 5% profit. So in order to fill this gap they put a lot of ads in their System UI. 

Now you might say that we can disable the ads and yes we can but the majority users of Xiaomi doesn't have the idea of it. You will ve shocked to know that the revenue of Xiaomi through the ads in third quarter of 2018 was whooping $477 Million. Your every click on the ads is monitored by Xiaomi so that they can provide you with better ads recommendations and this is really threatening to your privacy.

This reasons are not even the worst case. Lets move to even more worst scenario. 

3. CENSORED DATA : REAL THREAT TO PRIVACY

In September 2021, Lithuanian National Cyber Security Centre made a security assessment in which they considered three smartphones from which one was Xiaomi MI 10t 5G. So as we are talking about Xiaomi let's consider results of this device only. They found 2 components in the browser of this device which were Google Analytics and Censor Data. Google Analytics can assess to your Search history and browser history and it can send it to the Xiaomi Servers which is similar to the first case. This module gets activated at the moment when you switch on your phone for the first time. 

But The Censor Data collects your data in 61 parameters such as application activity, time of application used, language, user's mobile number, etc and it sends this data in an encrypted format to Xiaomi servers in Singapore. Even more threatening thing that on MI 10t 5G the Xiaomi applications were constantly downloading a file from Singapore servers namely MiadBlackListConfig. It contained the political, social and personal records of users. That data was censored by Chinese Government if they found any sensitive words like FREE TIBET, LONG LIVE TAIWAN INDEPENDENCE, etc. And providing an users private data to any third party though it can be Government is a major threat to that user. 

So far we talked about the how Xiaomi is vulnerable to an user's privacy but now lets talk about the conclusion.

CONCLUSION

• Don't ever trust blindly on the security claims of any brand not only Xiaomi.

• If you have any idea about how you can stop the data collection from your side by disabling the permissions share this knowledge with them who don't know about this thing.

• Stop using inbuilt apps in your Chinese Smartphones such as their music player, messenger, etc.

As such we can't stop this data collection but we can surely spread awareness about these companies so that some impact is made.