Amid the ongoing border dispute, India on Wednesday banned the 118 more Chinese apps, including the famous PUBG.
The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology released the complete list of the 118 banned apps citing a series of reasons related to breach of security. Earlier, India banned 59 apps, including Tik Tok.
“The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology has received many complaints from various sources, including several reports about the misuse of some mobile apps available on Android and iOS platforms for stealing and surreptitiously transmitting users’ data in an unauthorised manner to servers that have locations outside India. The compilation of these data, its mining and profiling by elements hostile to national security and defence of India, which impinges upon the sovereignty and integrity of India is a matter of very deep and immediate concern which requires emergency measures,” said the Ministry.
PUBG is estimated to have millions of users in India. In addition, APUS apps used for system protection and cleaning as well as chatting apps like Baidu, Woo Ve, WeChat were also in the list of banned 118 apps.
The Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre, Ministry of Home Affairs has also sent an exhaustive recommendation for blocking these malicious apps. “There has been a growing demand in the public space to take strict action against apps that harm India’s sovereignty as well as the privacy of our citizens, said the Ministry in a statement.
The Ministry said on the basis of these and on receiving of recent credible inputs that information posted, permissions sought, functionality embedded as well as data harvesting practices of the 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 the security of the State.
“In the interest of sovereignty and integrity of India, defence of India and security of the state. And using the sovereign powers, the Government of India has decided to block the usage of certain apps, used in both mobile and non-mobile Internet-enabled devices. These apps are listed in the attached appendix. This move will safeguard the interests of crores of Indian mobile and internet users. This decision is a targeted move to ensure safety, security, and sovereignty of Indian cyberspace,” said the Ministry.
Thursday, 03 September 2020 | PNS | New Delhi
