Xiaomi to set up India customer data center to deflect privacy concerns

Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi Inc said on Monday it plans to set up a data center in India next year to store local user data, as the fast-growing company seeks to deflect concerns about privacy that could hamper its efforts to expand overseas.

The move by privately owned Xiaomi comes after it said Wednesday it was migrating some data belonging to non-Chinese customers away from its servers in Beijing due to performance and privacy considerations.

Xiaomi, whose low-priced but feature-rich smartphones have made it the biggest smartphone vendor in China, entered India this year with plans to invest heavily to secure rapid growth in the world's third-largest smartphone market.

It sells its phones in India via flipkart.com, the country's biggest online retailer.

Xiaomi has sold nearly 500,000 handsets in India since it entered the market in July, a media report said on October 17.

On Monday, Xiaomi said it had been moving Indian users' data from its Beijing data center to data centers belonging to Amazon Web Services, the cloud computing platform of the online retailer Amazon.com Inc, in Singapore and the US since early 2014. It said that the process would be completed by the end of the year.

Xiaomi has faced several privacy controversies, including accusations from international security researchers and a government agency in Taiwan that it funnels unauthorized user data back to its servers in Beijing.

Indian media reported on October 20 that the country's air force had issued alerts to its personnel and their families against using Xiaomi phones over security concerns.

The Chinese company said on Monday it was attempting to contact Indian authorities for more details on local media reports, adding that it did not collect user data without permission.