From SoyaCincau:
A couple of weeks back, several Taiwanese sites had reported that the Redmi Note smart phone has been secretly sending personal information such as contacts, text messages and photos to servers in China. This had certainly cast a doubt on its user privacy stand especially with the Redmi Note has been selling well worldwide. Xiaomi takes such allegation seriously and they had strongly clarified that Xiaomi does not transmit any personal information without permission of its users.
Its MIUI operating system does occasionally made contact with its servers hosted in China from time to time for syncing the latest preset messages and OTA updates. When it comes to personal information, the device does back up your contacts, messages and photos if a user opts to use their MiCloud, which is similar to Apple’s iCloud or Google’s Cloud backup system. If MiCloud is not enabled, your personal info will not be synced to their servers online.
Read more on SoyaCincau.