India blacklists Garena’s Free Fire, 53 other apps on security concerns

India’s Union Ministry of Home Affairs has placed a ban on Garena’s popular game, Free Fire, and 53 other mobile applications it considers a threat to India’s security, Hindustan Times reported.

These apps are on top of the 118 Chinese apps the government banned in September 2020.

In a statement, the Information and Technology Ministry said that these apps allegedly obtain various critical permissions and collect sensitive user data that are being misused and transmitted to servers located in a hostile country.

Despite being founded by people of Chinese descent, Sea Group – the parent company of Garena – is actually a Singaporean company. It has a connection with China because it counts Tencent as one of its investors. However, the Chinese gaming giant currently only holds 18.7% of Sea Group’s shares after selling 14.5 million shares earlier this year.

See also: Org Chart: The people helming Sea Group

Besides Free Fire, apps like Baidu’s Nice Video and Tencent’s Xriver as well as NetEase’s Onmyoji Arena were also banned. Many of these platforms are rebranded versions of apps that were banned by the country in 2020.

India blocked many popular Chinese apps – such as TikTok, Shein, WeChat, AliExpress, and PUBG Mobile – after a border conflict soured relations between the two countries.