Government of India bans PUBG MOBILE, WeChat Work and several other Chinese apps

Indian government today announced that it will block 118 Chinese mobile apps in India. The list of banned apps includes PUBG Mobile, WeChat Work, Baidu and more. It is important to note that PUBG Mobile has millions of daily active users in India. Government of India mentioned that this move will safeguard the interests of Indian mobile and internet users.

“This decision is a targeted move to ensure safety, security and sovereignty of Indian cyberspace,” Indian government added in its press release.

You can find the full list of banned apps below.

Indian government also said that these apps are engaged in activities which is prejudicial to sovereignty and integrity of India, defense of India, security of state and public order. Read their full reason behind banning of these apps below.

The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology has received many complaints from various sources including several reports about misuse of some mobile apps available on Android and platforms for stealing and surreptitiously transmitting users’ data in an unauthorized manner to servers which have locations outside India. The compilation of these data, mining and profiling by elements hostile to national security and defense of India, which impinges upon the sovereignty and integrity of India, is a matter of very deep and immediate concern
which requires emergency measures.

The Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre, Ministry of Home Affairs has also sent an exhaustive recommendation for blocking these malicious apps. Likewise, there have been similar bipartisan concerns, flagged by various public representatives, both outside and inside the Parliament of India. There has been a strong chorus in the public space to take strict action against Apps that harm India’s sovereignty as well as the privacy of our citizens.

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.

Source: Government of India