Last week, on April 30th, Forbes posted an exclusive article warning readers that Chinese smartphone giant Xiaomi is recording millions of people’s phone usage, and sending it to Alibaba servers in China, which Xiaomi rents.According to the article, the default Xiaomi browser records all of the websites visited, even if “incognito mode” is on. In addition, opened folders and swiped screens, including swipes on the status bar and the phone settings page, are all also recorded and sent to the aforementioned servers.

An additional reason for concern noted by Forbes is that although the data is being encrypted as it is sent to the servers, its encryption is easily crackable, and chunks of the data can be transformed into readable information, which can link it to a specific user.

Xiaomi posted a response soon after, on May 2nd, which has been updated with more information with each passing day.

Initially, Xiaomi was “disappointed” with the Forbes article, and claimed that user privacy and internet security are of its top priority, and the company is “fully compliant with local laws and regulations.”

Xiaomi then explained that its data collection is aggregated and cannot be used to identify individuals, claiming that the reporting by Forbes is “misrepresentative of the facts.”

The smartphone giant later announced that it will provide its Mi Browser and Mint Browser users with an update, which will allow them to switch off the aggregated data collection in incognito mode. The update was swiftly made available through Google Play the next day.

It’s important to know that Xiaomi is far from the only company that collects user data, however. Google, for example, is well known to collect aggregated user data about sites visited on its browser Chrome, although the Alphabet giant has taken considerable efforts to make its data collection process as transparent as possible. Many other sillicon valley companies, such as Microsoft, also collect considerable amounts of user data.