New Delhi, July 25 (FN Agency) The Confederation of All India Traders (CAIT) has sought action against cloned apps of banned Chinese apps operating in the country. The Delhi-based traders’ body has written to Union Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman and IT Minister Ashwani Vaishnav invoking their attention towards re-entry of banned Chinese apps in India under masked identities. “Information posted, permissions sought, functionality embedded as well as data harvesting practices of these apps raise serious concerns that they collect and share data in surreptitious manner and compromise personal data and information of users that can have a severe threat to ‘Security of the Country’,” CAIT National President B C Bhartia and Secretary General Praveen Khandelwal said in a statement on Monday.
They claimed just a few months after the bans, the cloned apps started appearing on play store which show clear signs of being masked clones of the originally banned apps. Bhartia and Khandelwal said the modus-operandi of the apps is to relaunch the apps with similar looking names and icons. ”It is relatively easy to launch apps on the app-stores, all one needs is to create a developer account, and one can create as many developer accounts with different names as one wants.
The intent behind the ban was to address concerns/complaints that the apps in question were stealing and surreptitiously transmitting users’ data in an unauthorized manner to servers which have locations outside India,” they said. “This modus operandi completely circumvents the intent and safeguards of the prohibition imposed by the Indian govt on these specific apps” said the trade leaders.Bhartia and Khandelwal said as the owners of the new clones launched are the same as those of the banned apps, the backend infrastructure, technology, data servers and storage policy is highly likely to be the same as that of the banned apps.