Is it true that PUBG Mobile India is sharing data with Chinese servers ?

The desi version of PUBG Mobile India, has entered by keeping various disruptions in the mind, only by the name they have chosen as the Battlegrounds Mobile India. An expert says, it is just like a publicity stunt.

There is a controversy started few months back, serious allegation says that Battlegrounds Mobile India was sending some user data to a server located in China. Within a single day, the game had topped a million downloads. However, there have been various controversies over the game up to this point.

A report has found out that data sent and received by the Battlegrounds Mobile India APK is from China Mobile Communications servers in Beijing.

The IGN report claimed that the data of Battlegrounds Mobile India players were being sent to a China Mobile Communications server and the server to which data of Battlegrounds Mobile India players was sent is owned by the Chinese state-owned telecom operator. The report added that Battlegrounds Mobile India also established connections with Tencent servers.

The report also finds that Battlegrounds Mobile India is sending the data to a Tencent-run Proxima Beta in Hong Kong, as well as Microsoft Azure servers in US, Mumbai, and Moscow. To recall, PUBG Mobile had last year cut ties with Tencent, removing the Chinese giant as a publisher after PUBG Mobile was banned in India.

IGN, however, claimed in its new report that Battlegrounds Mobile India developers Krafton has fixed the bug and the data of Battlegrounds Mobile India players are no longer being sent to Chinese data servers. It is pertinent to mention that PUBG Mobile India was banned by the Indian government in September 2020 due to data privacy concerns.

Folks at IGN verified the claims by installing a data packet sniffer on their Android phone. The app tells which servers a device communicates with. Upon setting it to log all servers that Battlegrounds Mobile India would talk to, a whole game was player. After the game, a quick whois search for one of the servers spotted in the logs revealed that it was run by China Mobile Communications Corporation - a state-owned Chinese company.

The server for this is located in Beijing, China. The device data was being sent to this server, IGN said. Apart from this, Battlegrounds Mobile India also pings a Tencent server in Beijing when booting up. News18 could not verify the report independently. We have, although, reached out to Krafton for a response on the same and will update this story as and once it is received.

An obvious question arises on how the authority has given the permission to run the app.