I'm no fan of the stock MIUI experience either, especially china-only variants, but with that said... The bootloader unlock is 7 days and has been for every xi

I'm no fan of the stock MIUI experience either, especially china-only variants, but with that said... The bootloader unlock is 7 days and has been for every xiaomi phone I've owned. You can turn off "Sync" which is xiaomi's backup/sync service if you don't want to sync stuff up to the cloud... Providing your IMEI / phone number aka "personal info" is standard even across Apple with registering AC+ etc. There's community roms that remove all the chinese bloatware that comes preinstalled (https://xiaomi.eu/community/ https://xiaomi.eu/community/) plus add a bunch of new features that make it a pretty awesome experience.