Xiaomi To Move User Data Out of China On Privacy Concerns
Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi said on Thursday it is migrating its e-commerce platforms and user data away from its servers in Beijing due to performance and privacy considerations. Xiaomi vice president Hugo Barra said in a Wednesday blog post that the company's global e-commerce platforms and user data for all international users from its Beijing data centers to Amazon AWS data centers in California (USA) and Singapore. Xiaomi has also began using Akamai's global CDN infrastructure to speed up static page loads.
Barra added that the migration process will be completed by the end of October and will benefit users in Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, and Taiwan.
In 2015, Xiaomi is planning to further improve the performance of its services for users in large and fast-growing markets such as India and Brazil.
What Xiaomi's executive did not mention is that besides the faster service benefit , moving users' data away from China follows concerns about privacy and the need to comply with Chinese censorship laws.
Xiaomi eyes overseas expansion and has already 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.
Moving data offshore "better equips us to maintain high privacy standards and comply with local data protection regulations," Barra wrote.