India bans another 118 Chinese apps including PUBG

The second digital strike from India on Chinese. After banning 59 Chinese mobile apps back in June, the government has struck again. This time, India has banned 118 Chinese mobile apps including the mega-popular PUBG or PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, the online multiplayer battle royale game.

These Chinese mobile apps are said to be engaged in activities which are prejudicial to sovereignty and integrity of India, defence of India, security of state and public order.

India government has blocked the usage of these apps used in both mobile and non-mobile Internet-enabled devices. Thus PUBG on mobile, PC and gaming consoles are being banned in India.

For India Government, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology has invoked its power under section 69A of the Information Technology Act read with the relevant provisions of the Information Technology (Procedure and Safeguards for Blocking of Access of Information by Public) Rules 2009 and in view of the emergent nature of threats.

According to the official press statement, the IT Ministry has received numerous complaints regarding these apps which are available on both Android and iOS platforms. These apps are found to be stealing and surreptitiously transmitting India users data to servers outside of India (mainly to China) without any user consent. Also, these apps are found to be mining and profiling Indian users data, thus affecting national security and defence of India.

“On the basis of these and upon receiving of recent credible inputs that information posted, permissions sought, functionality embedded as well as data harvesting practices of above-stated Apps raise serious concerns that these Apps collect and share data in surreptitious manner and compromise personal data and information of users that can have a severe threat to security of the State,” said a press statement from Ministry of Electronics & IT.

Which all Chinese apps are banned?

Indian has banned the usage of 118 Chinese mobile apps by its citizens that pose a threat to sovereignty and integrity of India. Both Android (Google Play) and iOS (Apple Store) version of these mobile apps, along with their websites and their mobile websites will be banned in the country.

Some well know, and immense popular apps in the banned list include PUBG, PUBG mobile lite version, WeChat, ShareSave by Xiaomi, Alipay and Baidu.

In the coming days, Google and Apple will delist these banned 118 Chinese mobile apps making it inaccessible to download/update from Google Play Store and Apple Store. Also, Indian telecom operators and internet service providers will soon block these companies websites in India.