Playing Battlegrounds Mobile India? Your Android Phone Data Is Being Sent to a Server in China
If you’re playing Battlegrounds Mobile India aka PUBG, it’s likely that data regarding your Android device is being sent to a server in China. IGN India readers reached out on condition of anonymity stating that data sent and received by the Battlegrounds Mobile India APK are from China Mobile Communications servers in Beijing, the Tencent-run Proxima Beta in Hong Kong, as well as Microsoft Azure servers located in the US, Mumbai, and Moscow.
We were able to reproduce these results by installing a data packet sniffer app on our Android phone. This can tell us which servers our device communicates with. We set it to log all 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 run by China Mobile Communications Corporation and located in Beijing, China. What’s more is, our device data was being sent to said server. You can check out all out all the screenshots that prove this right here.
While Krafton’s Battlegrounds Mobile India terms of service states that personal information of players would be stored and processed on servers based in India and Singapore, it also mentions that the company may “transfer your data to other countries” in order to meet “legal requirements”, perhaps giving the company a way out to do this.
That said, it doesn’t seem to be in line with what was earlier committed. When PUBG Mobile along with 117 other apps were banned in India, due to geo-political tensions with China, Krafton wanted to work with the government to be compliant with local laws. After that, it claimed to have cut ties with Tencent in terms of publishing the game in India and committed to invest $100 million in the country.
According to a report on Techcrunch, Krafton had said that the “privacy and security of Indian player data being a top priority”.
