Authorities in Taiwan are feeling a bit uneasy about the numbers of Xiaomi phones coming into their mobile market from the Mainland, and have started a three-month-long investigation into the phones' hardware and software to see if the devices represent a "security threat."
The main concern is related to Xiaomi devices' tendency to 'phone home,' a process in which the phone sends mysterious messages to a server in Beijing without any user input. That sounds like some seriously shady stuff, but it turns out that it may be the stuff of urban (well, internet) legend.
Rumors about "secret" communications between Xiaomi phones and Mainland servers hit a fever pitch in early August, forcing Xiaomi VP of Global Affairs, Hugo Barra, to give a statement assuring worried parties that people had "severely misinterpreted" the phones' messages, and that the pings back to Beijing were part of Xiaomi's built-in services like theme and app downloads.
Barra said that no personal information is relayed in the messages, and that, if users choose to use Xiaomi's online back-up service (which they do not have to use if they don't want to) then some of that information may be backed up on servers in Beijing.
That sounds innocuous enough, but Taiwan doesn't seem to be buying it. On Tuesday, more than a month after Barra attempted to put everyone's minds at ease, island authorities publically worried that the phones' tendency to contact Beijing servers could compromise cyber or industrial security and, while a ban has not been formally put on the table as an option, it certainly seems within the realm of possibility (Taiwan's police force, for example, strongly discourages the use of WeChat for similar reasons).
This news comes just as Xiaomi is getting underway with its massive launch on the Indian subcontinent. If Taiwan's authorities find anything untoward going on behind the scenes, you can bet the company's international ambitions (and domestic ones, for that matter) will experience some hiccups.
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