The Union Government has decided to permanently ban 59 Chinese mobile applications including TikTok. The development comes several months after the government had first banned Chinese apps temporarily in last June.

The government had sought responses from the companies on the show cause notices, but sources said that it is not satisfied with their responses.

According to people in the know, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) has sent notices to 59 apps including Tiktok.

The ministry suspended access to the apps in India last year amid the border tussle with China. It had said that these measures were undertaken on the basis of credible information that these apps are engaged in activities which are prejudicial to sovereignty and integrity of India, defence of India, security of state and public order.

The Ministry of Information Technology in a media statement had said that these apps were banned in view of the emergent nature of threats and that as per information available, these apps were engaged in activities “prejudicial to sovereignty and integrity of India, defence of India, security of state and public order.”

At the time of writing in June 2020, TikTok had over a billion downloads on Google’s Play Store and was estimated to have over 120 million users in India.

“The Ministry of Information and Technology issued a statement that it had received many complaints from various sources including several reports about misuse of some mobile apps available on Android and iOS platforms for “stealing and surreptitiously transmitting users' data in an unauthorized manner to servers which have locations outside India,” the government had said at the time. 

The Chinese apps under interim ban include Club Factory, SHAREit, Likee, Mi Video Call (Xiaomi), Weibo, Baidu, BIGO LIVE, WeChat, UC Browser and Xiaomi's Mi Community.

With IANS inputs