Jubilee Post News & Views
Jubilee News Desk
Popular among youngsters the mobile game PUBG has been banned in India along with more than 100 other apps with linkage to China as tensions escalate at the two nations’ at the border.
Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology invoking it’s 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 decided to block 118 mobile apps as they were engaged in activities which is prejudicial to sovereignty and integrity of India, defence of India, security of state and public order.
The IT ministry in a press release said it has received many complaints from various sources including several reports about misuse of some mobile apps available on Android and iOS platforms for stealing and surreptitiously transmitting users’ data in an unauthorized manner to servers which have locations outside India.
The compilation of these data, its mining and profiling by elements hostile to national security and defence of India, which ultimately 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.
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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, said the press statement.
The move comes months after New Delhi banned 59 Chinese apps including TikTok, which counted India as its biggest international market, UC Browser, and UC News
Among the apps that were banned include search engine Baidu, business collaboration suite WeChat Work, cloud storage service Tencent Weiyun, Rise of Kingdoms game, utility service APUS Launcher, a VPN for TikTok, e-commerce service Mobile Taobao, video hosting service Youko, news outlet Sina News, card reader service CamCard, as well as a miniature version of PUBG.
