For more privacy, let’s go to India
One of China’s largest electronics companies, Xiaomi, has a plan. They want to sell 100,000 phones in India every week. But there’s a problem. A privacy problem.
Chinese smartphones have notoriously been banned or even put on a trade restriction lists because people are concerned that they might be carrying spyware installed by the Chinese government.
To combat this stigma, Xiaomi announced that they will be building a data center in India to ensure customers that they will not be storing their data on Chinese servers.
Molly Wood, Technology columnist at the New York Times, brought up an interesting point in this regard. She wonders if at some point, some country will declare themselves as the “Switzerland of data storage,” in that this country will not honor requests from anyone to sift through your data.
However, there’s only one slight problem with that, she says. What if we don’t trust the manufacturers of the product either? What then?
Click on the media player above to hear Molly Wood in conversation with Marketplace Tech host Ben Johnson.
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