Battlegrounds Mobile India Android Data Sent to China Server [UPDATE]

Update at 11:38am, June 23, 2021: Krafton has finally admitted it is aware of ongoing data lapses regarding Battlegrounds Mobile India. You can read about it here.

Update at 10:17pm, June 21, 2021: Krafton seems to have updated Battlegrounds Mobile India to stop pinging China servers. You can read about this here. Original story as follows.

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 — a Chinese state-owned company — and the server is 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.

If this wasn’t enough, Battlegrounds Mobile India also pings a Tencent server in Beijing when booting the game up.

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 obtain logs on their device regarding Battlegrounds Mobile India notifying the following servers related to Tencent as well:

• http://astat.bugly.qcloud.com (Qcloud is a cloud computing platform run by Tencent)
• http://down.anticheatexpert.com (Tencent’s anti-cheat solution)

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”.

With the spotlight on Battlegrounds Mobile India, you’d think Krafton would know better than to push Indian device data to a server in China given the political situation, evidently this is not the case.

At the moment politicians from both BJP and Congress have demanded a ban on the game. Their calls for removing Battlegrounds Mobile India from Google Play, where it’s currently available, was joined by the Confederation of All India Traders late last week.

They claim that Krafton’s India employees were working on the game while China’s Tencent operated it in the country, Battlegrounds Mobile India’s Google Play Store package name contains the term ‘PUBG Mobile’, believes that its $22.4 million investment in esports company Nodwin is a security threat, and that with a 15.5 percent 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. Though considering that it stayed silent instead of condemning racism in the Battlegrounds Mobile community despite repeated requests for comment directed at India boss Aneesh Aravind and Chairman CH Kim, it’s unlikely that the company would respond to this either.

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