Apple has been known to bow to certain governments when it comes to removing VPNs and other sensitive apps from the App Store for those countries – it has removed VPN apps from both the Russian and Chinese App Stores in the past. The company is now complying with recent new privacy-unfriendly laws in India, requiring it to remove certain VPN apps from the store.
India in 2022 passed a new law, effectively banning the anonymous use of VPNs, while also banning VPN providers that kept no logs of customer activity. (Popular VPNs – like NordVPN, Private Internet Access, and others – do not keep user activity logs.)
Initially, the law’s implementation was delayed over multiple objections. It was later put into force, but was not enforced. However, the great VPN shutdown has now begun.
TechCrunch reports Apple has begun removing VPN apps from the Indian App Store.
The rules mandate that VPN providers and cloud service operators maintain comprehensive records of their customers, including names, addresses, IP addresses and transaction histories, for a five-year period.
More than half-a-dozen VPN apps, including Cloudflare’s widely-used 1.1.1.1, have been pulled from India’s Apple App Store and Google Play Store following intervention from government authorities, TechCrunch has learned.
The Indian Ministry of Home Affairs issued removal orders for the apps, according to a document reviewed by TechCrunch and a disclosure made by Google to Lumen, Harvard University’s database that tracks government takedown requests globally.
The removal of the offending VPN apps from the Indian App Store may take awhile, as Apple is only removing each app after it is instructed to by the regulators. However, considering no proper app keeps user logs of any kind, there will likely be hundreds of VPN apps removed from the App Store by the time the purge ends.
(Via 9to5Mac)
