Chicken Dinner - The slayed chickens have come home to roost !

 

The Government dropped a bombshell right in the hearts of millions of gamers with the freshly imposed ban on 118 Apps of Chinese origin. But it wasn’t ban on apps like Camscanner or VideoByte that mattered to those who let out the loudest moans of despair upon hearing the news. PubG was the sole drug of those addicts and the ban forcefully snatched the one solitary escapade they had.

 Once the cries of  these PubG addicts had  subsided, a question arose - expectedly so. WHY ???  Why Indeed !

 

WHY THE BAN?!

The Government in its notification cited threats to sovereignty and integrity of India as grounds for the ban. They also  claimed that these apps  were illegally transmitting data of  Indian users to  servers located abroad, without the permission of their users. But all of this  sounds like common bureaucratic jargon. Right? So lets ease it up a bit and try to understand what was really going on.

 USA invaded  Iraq in 2003. Hundreds of thousands of lives were lost. While on the outside, the invasion had been attributed to Saddam Hussein’s possession of weapons of mass destruction, successive tell-all accounts from economists and foreign affairs analysts reveal a completely different tale. USA invaded Iraq to gain possession of their oil reserves. Simple.  

Cut to 2020. The saying goes - ‘data is the new oil’. If oil alone could trigger a war in the Middle-East in 2003, imagine the potency of threat from the ‘New oil’in 2020. If our phones were to be embedded with surveillance applications, would we really be comfortable with doing ALL that we do on our phones? Lets be real. NO. One cannot even imagine the kind of intelligence threats the Government has to face  on a daily basis as hundreds of  apps used by the nation’s residents serve as real time data broadcasters & transmitters for their  handlers abroad. Unsuspecting people who in their hurry to use an app agree to terms and conditions - which sometimes explicitly mention about the way in their private data might be used - are the target prey of foreign players. 

Here's an Analogy for  you!

Imagine renting your house out to a guy who peeps through your windows and curtains as you go about your life. Maintains a low  profile and yet as you walk past him, you can feel his eyes following you. There’s a word for such annoying creatures in Gen Z’s  vocabulary  - ‘CREEP’. What would you do? Evict  him. Right?  Obviously. The same goes for the Government as they evicted hundreds of mobile applications with creepy characteristics that had made their  way into millions of  smartphones across the length and breadth of  India.

 

Should I care about the surveillance? 

First off, private data should  remain private. No  questions asked. And if that isn’t a reason enough for you, consider this. As foreign handlers track every chat of yours, every website you visit,  products you look for or simply what you eat/say/think/imagine/envision, they gain access to you. Intimately. They'll be able to predict your future purchases, preferred contacts, relationship webs and a lot more. And then influence your behavior by showing ads of a certain kind, in order to strengthen your pre existing notions. But these are just the more innocent manifestations of data usage. The more scary implications could involve using your account as a platform to not just further espionage via spywares but also cause riots and community clashes on religious lines. 

Like Voldemort did with Harry, they can then not only track you in real time, but also predict your moves and control you. Make you do things they want you to do. You end up losing your individuality. You become a part of a much larger scheme of  things of a foreign Government that has insidious designs for India and you unfortunately, are a tool in their hands. Scared now? Good  for you.

 

What Now? 

 

Vacuums don’t auger well for a constantly hungry society. A replacement was bound to come in. Notwithstanding the presence of similar  games like Call of duty and Fortnite, PubG not working? Don’t worry. Our  very own Swadeshi 'FauG' is here. Introduced by our Swadeshi Iron Man – Akshay Kumar. Can't promise if the winners will get a Chicken dinner or a home made ‘Imli ki chatni’,  but  when it comes to serving  the nation, any sacrifice is worth making. Or so you've got to say at least. 

More apps are expected to be banned in the future. It shows the horrifying depths to  which Chinese propaganda has reached our society. Any effort to weed out the problem will cause some discomfort. Till a viable and equally appealing alternative comes into the market, take it all with a grain of salt!

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