Indian intelligence agencies have asked the government to ban or advise people to stop using 52 Chinese mobile apps because of concerns that these were not safe and ended up extracting large amounts of data outside India, Hindustan Times told people familiar with the development.The list of applications submitted to the government by the security establishment includes the video conferencing software Zoom, TikTok short-video software, and other utility and content applications such as UC client, Xender, SHAREit, and Clean-master.
Government sources have indicated that intelligence agencies’ recommendation had been recently backed by the Secretariat of the National Security Council, which felt these could be detrimental to the security of India.“The discussions on the recommendations continue,” an official said, adding that the criteria and threats associated with each mobile device need to be discussed one by one.
Earlier the home ministry had already released an advisory on the use of Zoom in April this year on the advice of India’s National Cyber security Agency – Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-in).
