Battlegrounds Mobile India found sharing data with Chinese servers – Times of India

After almost a year of getting banned in India, Krafton finally opened early access for its Indian version of PUBG Mobile dubbed as Battlegrounds Mobile India for Android users. The company has already mentioned that the game abides by all the laws and regulations laid out by the Indian government and it does not have any connection with the Chinese version of the game of the company (Tencent) that manages the global version of the game. It was also made clear that Battlegrounds Mobile India is an exclusive title for the Indian region only.
However, as per a recent report by IGN, Battlegrounds Mobile India is reportedly exchanging data with the Chinese servers.
The report mentions that the BGMI Indian players data is being shared with PUBG Mobile’s Chinese servers located in Beijing. Specifically mentioning, IGN wrote that the data is also being shared with Tencent-owned Proxima Beta server located in Hong Kong as well as Microsoft Azure servers located in the US, Mumbai and Moscow.
IGN is claiming this based on the data collected using a data packet sniffer app on an Android smartphone which can tell that the smartphone is communicating with which server. The website also mentioned that they set the application to log all the servers that the game was communicating with. Where it found BGMI sharing game links to China.
Upon checking the log, the website found that it was communicating with servers 36.152.4.34 which was a server located in Beijing, China and operated by China Mobile Communications Corporation. The game also pings a Tencent server in Beijing when booting the game up.
The one reason behind this could be because of PUBG Mobile account transfer feature that Krafton is allowing BGMI players to transfer their account and game data from PUBG Mobile to BGMI till December 2021.
As of now there’s no clarification received from Krafton’s end. But considering the early ban calls for the Battlegrounds Mobile India already in the air, it will be interesting to see the government’s take on this matter.