Tencent’s PUBG Mobile has come in the spotlight with the Indian government mulling a ban over the battle royale game. It faces an accusation similar to other Chinese apps like TikTok have been facing recently. The company has just updated its privacy and user data policies and has gone a step further to explain where it stores and processes user data.
The company has been notifying this change to its users via an in-game popup, official discord channel and a press note that extensively shows all the details the policy encompasses. It says it collects information regarding IP address, battery, storage, network type, OS version, Android ID (MAC & IDFV), info regarding game services and few other things.
The new policy change also notifies that its servers are located in India, Singapore, Hong Kong SAR, USA. Interestingly it has listed People’s Republic of China only under the engineering and support teams which also has a separate team in India, USA and Hong Kong SAR. With this, PUBG is trying to convey that data is (or will be from now on) handled locally as long as the users are in India.
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PUBG has clearly mentioned that it does not share the information with third-party entities apart from providing game services, in addition to marketing and advertising programs. It says it relies on third-parties for cloud backup, fraud detection and support ticketing (in-game support).
The explicits of the data include open ID, IP address, registration & login time apart from game services mentioned above. The company is ready to share the details regarding the processing to any court or legal obligations that may arise in future pertaining to a few circumstances.
Regarding users’ rights, PUBG says they will have rights to access their data, get a copy of it, delete or object the processing of data by the company. It has also mentioned a complaint mail dpo@proximabeta.com where users can send their queries related to security and other services.
That being said, this change comes after the recent ban of additional 47 apps by the Government of India following an earlier ban of 59 apps back including TikTok in June. Recent reports also stated that the government is scrutinizing 275 apps and games including PUBG for data and funding routes to find potential violations.
