How concerned is everyone with this article? https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/01/android-oem-xiaomi-lands-on-us-investment-ban-list/?amp=1
I don’t use any Xiaomi devices, but aren’t most of those Zigbee and BLE anyway ? As long as you keep everything local and your Chinese devices (and non-Chinese too) in a separate subnet, unable to access the internet, there’s nothing really to worry about as far as security is concerned.
Whether or not you want to put your money into a company that has deep ties into the Chinese government is another question. And Xiaomi is far from being in the only player in that particular game.
Not terribly. I’m optimistic that common sense will prevail eventually and both parties will realise that a trade war is not in their interests. Xiaomi products are cheap and the ones I have are easy to replace.
Am I bothered that Xiaomi servers are likely accessible by the Chinese government? A bit - but I doubt that there are any alternatives that are not accessible by all of the super-powers.
Andrew
Lets say you have a bunch of Aqara sensors from Xiaomi, e.g. a battery powered door or motion sensor. It’s only means of communication is zigbee. They’re connected to a raspberry pi with a ConBee 2 or any other zigbee device possible to connect to a raspberry pi. Let’s say there are other than Xiaomi devices on that very same zigbee mesh network, and that the raspberry pi in fact got internet access.
Even then, what is that door sensor going to do? Neither the ConBee 2 or Raspberry Pi will forward any traffic to the internet from those sensors. What could possibly happen? Would they take over my dishwasher?
I do understand that there is a significant issue if you were to have a Xiaomi hub or something similar that would have full access to anything on your home network and internet. But that very same issue would go with any proprietary smart hub, like a HomePod, or the Google or Amazon equivalents. Not just Xiaomi. The only difference is if you want China or FBI to know your light settings or if your dishwasher is finished 
That is why you stick with a raspberry pi with open source software as your home hub. I do trust the community and publicly available source code more than any proprietary / closed system.
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