Battlegrounds Mobile India, PUBG Mobile’s Indian avatar is sending user data to a server in China, a report in IGN found. This, despite the fact that PUBG Mobile was banned in India due to the developers’ Chinese involvement. The report said that readers reached out to IGN saying that data sent and received by the Battlegrounds Mobile India APK is from China Mobile Communications servers in Beijing. 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.
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.
This recent development seems to be contradictory to what was earlier committed. After PUBG Mobile’s ban, Krafton wanted to work with the government of India to be compliant with local laws. Krafton even claimed to cut ties with Tencent, removing the Chinese company as a publisher for PUBG Mobile. Krafton, while announcing Battlegrounds Mobile India, had said that the “privacy and security of Indian player data being a top priority.”
Currently, politicians in India are already demanding a ban on Battlegrounds Mobile India. Recently, the All India Traders Confederation also called for a ban on Battlegrounds Mobile India, even though the game has not seen a final rollout yet. Given the spotlight on Battlegrounds Mobile India, one would think that Krafton would know better than linking to servers in China and more so, servers operated by Tencent, but that does not seem to be the case.
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