Xiaomi Redmi Note Is Sending Your Photos And Text Messages To The Chinese Government

[ijKs Snow]

Xiaomei, Oppo, OnePlus are all subsidized by the Chinese government to make them cheaper then the rest of the competition. Reason? I personally thought it was a move by China to take as much market shares from Apple and Samsung, but maybe there is another motive behind it.... hmm..

 

[FroggyTaco]

All your base are belong to us!

[StingBull]

 

If the Great Wall was in America instead, I'm pretty sure this would have been real.

[xAcid9]

Update. No, it's not sending your naked pictures to China government. 

 

http://www.lowyat.net/2014/07/did-xiaomi-really-install-spyware-on-the-redmi-note/

https://www.facebook.com/hbarra76/posts/10152156213696612

 

One of the glaring omissions from the GSMarena article was the fact that Xiaomi Hong Kong’s official Facebook page published a statement less than two days after the original OCWorkbench post, addressing the privacy concerns. The OCWorkbench article, we were told, “severely misinterpreted” the forum discussion thread, and contained plenty of factual errors that may have been caused by poor translation.

 

In fact, the forum member in question made no mention that he had flashed MIUI with another ROM. Secondly, the screenshots taken as “evidence” of data uploads were merely pings to Xiaomi servers to initiate a download. The article also shows that the IP addresses the Redmi Note were pinging to belonged to a company called Forest Eternal Communication Tech. Co. Ltd, which is the Internet Data Center where Xiaomi hosts its servers – something both articles failed to mention.

Finally, one of the main reasons why this issue caused quite a furore was because the Messaging app was pinging the servers instead of a core system app. One crucial bit of information that would explain this is the fact that MIUI’s Messaging app also serves as an over-the-air update tool for Xiaomi to push SMS messages to its users containing anything from greeting messages, jokes to location-based ads. It is a common feature in China, and in Malaysia, we also see these sort of spam messages ads pushed to our SMS inboxes from our local telcos. To generate these personalised messages, MIUI pings the Xiaomi servers in China before pushing the messages out to users – and not to secretly initiate user data uploads.

Almost every app pings a server to initiate an action, like Gmail to refresh your inbox, hence the act of pinging a server should not be construed as a suspicious act in itself.

 

In any case, Xiaomi’s international Facebook pages will all run a Q&A post to address the privacy concerns later today.