Earlier this week, many websites reported that one of Xiaomi’s handset — the Redmi Note — was secretly sending users personal data including their texts and pictures to a server in China. This led many people to doubt the company’s ethics and their promise to respect a user’s privacy.

Hugo Barra, Vice President at Xiaomi and an ex-Googler, has taken to Google Plus to shoot down these rumors.

According to Barra, MIUI — the ROM which Xiaomi devices runs on — requests public data from the company’s server from time to time. “These include data such as preset greeting messages (thousands of jokes, holiday greetings and poems) in the Messaging app and MIUI OTA update notifications, i.e. all non-personal data that does not infringe on user privacy.” —  he said. 

He further explained that the company does not uploads a user data without their knowledge and approval. Xiaomi devices do come with Mi Cloud, which allows users to backup their personal data like contacts, photos etc. to the cloud but users are required to explicitly activate it first. It can also be deactivated anytime a user wants and is similar to other popular cloud services like Dropbox and iCloud.

Lastly, Hugo states that the company takes user privacy very seriously and any unlawful activity in this regard can be a detrimental to the company’s image and its global expansion plans. As rightly pointed out by him, the original source of this news misinterpreted what the discussion thread was trying to say and did not bother going through the company’s Q&A page as well.