A month after banning as many as 59 Chinese applications, the Narendra Modi-led government has taken yet another decision to ban 47 more Chinese applications on Monday. If reports doing the rounds are to be believed, the recent 47 banned applications were functioning as clones of the previously banned apps.
Earlier, Indian government banned 59 Chinese applications including TikTok. Several popular applications including Shareit, Helo, Likee, WeChat, UC Browser, Shein have been mentioned among the list of banned Chinese apps.
This major move is aimed at safeguarding the interests of crores of Indian mobile and internet users. This important decision is a targeted move to ensure complete safety and sovereignty of Indian cyberspace, the Ministry of Information Technology added in a notification.
In the notification, the ministry added that it has received many complaints from several sources including several reports about misuse of some mobile applications available on Android and iOS platforms for stealing and secretively transmitting users’ data in an unauthorized manner to servers which have locations outside India.
Besides all this, the Indian government is also planning to put a complete ban on 250 apps including the likes of PubG, Ali Express. Sources added that the government is examining the list of over 250 Chinese apps that are currently under scanner for breaching national security and user privacy.
Some of the top gaming apps linked with China are also expected to be banned anytime soon and the new list is being made, sources confirmed in a statement. The Chinese apps that recently came under the scanner of the government include Alibaba, PUBG, Tencent, Xiaomi, ByteDance and others.
“The Ministry of 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 has decided to block 59 apps since in view of the information available they are engaged in activities which is prejudicial to sovereignty and integrity of India, defence of India, security of state and public order”, the Indian government said in a release.