The Center on Tuesday banned 43 more mobile apps, mostly Chinese-owned, including those of e-commerce giant Alibaba Group.
The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MEITY), the governing authority, issued an order under Section 69A of the Information Technology Act blocking access to the 43 mobile apps on the grounds that they have been “Performing activities that are detrimental to the sovereignty, integrity of India, defense of India, state security and public order.”
“The Alibaba Group apps, the short video sharing app Snack video, the Cam Card business card reader app, the Lalamove truck and driver aggregator are some of the top apps that have been blocked this time,” said an official from the ministry to The Hindustan Times.
A second ministry official said that all of the banned apps were Chinese. “Reports keep coming in as it is an ongoing process. MHA sends the report which is brought to the attention of the secretary and the orders are then processed. There is a proper judicial process, which examines the division of cyber laws to assess violations “.
The second official added that Lalamove is one of the fastest growing logistics services in the world and the decision to ban it was important.
This is the fourth tranche of apps that the government has banned amid the ongoing clash between Indian and Chinese troops in eastern Ladakh. The conflict, which escalated in June after the deaths of 20 Indian soldiers in clashes in the Galwan Valley, shows no signs of resolution. Recent reports also suggest that the Chinese have built roads and a village at Doklam in Bhutan, where there was a clash between India and China in 2017.
Some of the banned Chinese apps this time include AliSuppliers mobile app, Alibaba Workbench, AliExpress, Alipay Cashier, Chinese Social, ChinaLove, among others.
This is the latest in a series of bans targeting Chinese players.
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On September 3, India banned 118 mobile apps linked to China, including the popular game PUBG, two months after similar restrictions on 59 apps, mostly Chinese, and a month after banning 47 more related to that country, citing concerns. that they are “detrimental to sovereignty and integrity … defense of India, state security and public order” in the midst of a months-long confrontation with its northern neighbor on the Royal Line of Control (LAC).
In late June, India banned dozens of mobile apps, including Bytedance’s TikTok, Alibaba’s UC Browser, and Tencent’s WeChat over what it said were national security concerns. He banned a few more at the end of July.
MEITY had said that the applications attempted to steal and surreptitiously transmit user data in an “unauthorized manner to servers having locations outside of India.”
Apar Gupta, a trustee of the Internet Freedom Foundation, said the latest press release does not even mention “specific underlying reasons” and simply refers to earlier orders. “This is a worrying progression of the practice of the ban on applications that are normalized,” Gupta said.
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