Indian government took the bold step of imposing a total ban on 118 apps earlier this week, including popular battle Royale game PUBG: Mobile, with most of these having close links to China. The other banned apps include Baidu, Baidu Express Edition, Alipay, Tencent Watchlist, FaceU, WeChat reading, Government WeChat, Tencent Weiyun, APUS Launcher Pro, APUS Security, Cut Cut, ShareSave by Xiaomi, and CamCard. A statement from the government said that these apps are prejudicial to sovereignty and integrity of India.  

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“Government blocks 118 mobile apps which are prejudicial to sovereignty and integrity of India, Defence of India, Security of State and Public Order,” the statement from government of India said. 

Servers in China 

Despite government’s explanation, a lot of people have been questioning how exactly can a game be a threat to India. Karmesh Gupta, CEO & Co-founder at WiJungle(World's first unified network security gateway) explains that this is because Tencent, the company behind PUBG, has a majority of its servers in China.  

“The prime reason behind blocking PUBG Mobile and Mobile Lite is from national security standpoint as its publisher, Tencent, has its majority servers based in China,” he said. 

Gupta explained that various complaints were received by Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology including an exhaustive recommendation from the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre, Ministry of Home Affairs about the misuse of mobile apps available on android and IOS platforms to transmit user’s data on servers outside India. 

Data Harvesting a Concern 

There were concerns around most of these banned apps secretly sharing the data which could lead to a severe threat to the country.

“After credible inputs that information posted, permissions sought, functionality embedded as well as data harvesting practices of multiple apps including PUBG raised serious concerns that these apps collect and share data in a secretive manner and compromise personal data and information of users that can have a severe threat to the security of the state & thus finally under section 69A of IT Act & relevant provisions under IT Rules 2009, MeitY blocked PUBG,” he added.