Xiaomi/Redmi smartphones, one of the best value purchases available in the market at any point in time from past few years. Packing some insane hardware at very attractive price points. These phones tend to offer more which general public can't refuse. Xiaomi/Redmi has also been looking to the needs of the developer community, with decisions such as unlocking bootloader — to which a lot of other popular manufacturers discard. These reasons make them one of the most popular devices in developer community.
However, recent reports from security researchers [forbes] point towards a worrying privacy issue observed on Xiaomi’s/Redmi default web browser known commonly as Mi Browser. Forbes’ cybersecurity contributor and associate editor Thomas Brewster, along with cybersecurity researchers Gabriel Cirlig and Andrew Tierney recently concluded in a report that Xiaomi’s various web browsers were sending data to remote servers. They allege that the data being sent included a history of all websites visited, including the URLs, all search engine queries, and all the items viewed on Xiaomi’s news feed, along with device metadata. What’s even worrying about this data collection allegation is that this data is being collected even if you seemingly browse with “incognito mode” enabled.
This problem is now a big concern among the users since Mi Browser & Mint Browsers[Browser available in play store by Xiaomi Inc.] have nearly 15M+ downloads.
It would be very interesting to see how xiaomi reacts to this.
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