If you are playing Battlegrounds Mobile India aka PUBG, chances are the data about your Android device is being sent to a server in China. IGN India readers contacted on condition of anonymity stating that the data sent and received by APK Battlegrounds Mobile India is from China Mobile Communications servers in Beijing, the Proxima beta run by Tencent in Hong Kong, as well as only Microsoft Azure servers located in the United States. , Bombay and Moscow.
We were able to replicate these results by installing a packet data sniffer app on our Android phone. This can tell us which servers our device is communicating with. We set it up to register all the servers that Battlegrounds Mobile India would talk to when we play the game. Then we played an entire match. After that we checked the logs on the packet sniffer.
A quick whois search for one of the servers spotted in the logs (36.152.4.34 to be precise) revealed that it was managed by China Mobile Communications Corporation and located in Beijing, China. In addition, the data from our device was sent to said server. You can check out all the screenshots that prove it here.
If that wasn’t enough, Battlegrounds Mobile India also ping a Tencent server in Beijing when starting the game.
I didn’t even have to play a game this time. pic.twitter.com/Xmb6Gnhj52
– rishi alwani (@RishiAlwani) June 20, 2021
Interestingly, our source was able to get logs on their device regarding Battlegrounds Mobile India by also notifying the following servers related to Tencent:
- http://astat.bugly.qcloud.com (Qcloud is a cloud computing platform managed by Tencent)
- http://down.anticheatexpert.com (Tencent’s anti-cheat solution)
While Krafton’s Battlegrounds Mobile India Terms of Service state that players’ personal information would be stored and processed on servers based in India and Singapore, they also state that the company may “transfer your data to other countries. In order to meet the “legal requirements”, perhaps giving the company a means to do so.
Having said that, it doesn’t appear to be in line with what has been hired before. When PUBG Mobile and 117 other apps were banned in India, due to geopolitical tensions with China, Krafton wanted to work with the government to comply with local laws. After that, he claimed to have severed ties with Tencent in terms of publishing the game in India and pledged to invest $ 100 million in the country.
According to a report on Techcrunch, Krafton said “the privacy and security of Indian player data is a top priority.”
With the spotlight on Battlegrounds Mobile India, you’d think Krafton would do better than push data from Indian devices to a server in China given the political situation, obviously it isn’t.
For now, politicians from the BJP and Congress have called for the game to be banned. Their calls for the removal of Battlegrounds Mobile India from Google Play, where it is currently available, have been joined by the Confederation of All Indian Traders at the end of last week.
They claim that Krafton’s Indian employees worked on the game while Tencent operated it in the country, Battlegrounds Mobile India’s Google Play Store package name contains the term “PUBG Mobile”, estimates its investment of $ 22.4 million of dollars in esports company Nodwin is a security threat. , and with a 15.5% stake, Tencent is Krafton’s second largest shareholder.
As always, we’ve reached out to Krafton for comment and will update this story if we hear from the company. While he has remained silent instead of condemning racism in the Battlegrounds Mobile community despite repeated requests for comment from Indian boss Aneesh Aravind and President CH Kim, the company is unlikely to respond either.
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