Smartphone giant will move customer data outside China, citing 'privacy standards'
Chinese smartphone competitor Xiaomi revealed on Thursday that it will move some data on its non-Chinese customers away from its Beijing servers.
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The company’s international vice president Hugo Barra made the announcement on social media, where he claimed the migration is part of a larger attempt to uphold privacy considerations and improve performance.
He said: “Our primary goal in moving to a multi-site server architecture was to improve the performance of our services for Mi fans around the world, cut down latency and reduce failure rates.”
“At the same time, it also better equips us to maintain high privacy standards and comply with local data protection regulations.”
“This is a very high priority for Xiaomi as we expand into new markets over the next few years.”
The data will be housed on Amazon servers in the US as well as data centres in Singapore.
Interestingly, Apple did the exact opposite earlier in the year when it decided to store Chinese user data on Chinese mainland servers.
Just three years old, Xiaomi has quickly become China’s top smartphone manufacturer, but privacy has always been an issue for the company as industry analysts have noted.