India banned CamScanner four years ago but government agencies are still using it

This article was originally published in Rest of World, which covers technology’s impact outside the West.

In October, a popular YouTuber tweeted out a document issued by the Election Commission of India that had been scanned using CamScanner, a Chinese document-scanning app.

CamScanner has been banned in India since June 2020, when the government blocked 59 Chinese apps amid a border conflict with China. The government stated at the time that these apps were “prejudicial to sovereignty and integrity of India, defence of India, security of state and public order.”

The Election Commission is not the only Indian government-adjacent entity still using this banned scanning app. Rest of World found 30 other instances of documents uploaded by government departments and ministries that were scanned with CamScanner since the app was banned more than four years ago. The documents were easily identified because they bore the watermark “Scanned with CamScanner.”

Rest of World found that in India’s revenue department and the state governments of Rajasthan, Himachal Pradesh, and West Bengal officials have repeatedly used CamScanner over the past four years. Officials in the Jammu and Kashmir region have also used CamScanner several times since the ban. In 2021, Delhi police were called out on social media for using CamScanner and apologised for “inadvertently” using the app – but Rest of World found multiple documents that appear to have been scanned with the app in the years after. The Delhi police, revenue department, and state governments did not respond to requests for comment.

The government’s ban prevented new downloads, but those who already had CamScanner on their phones were likely able to continue using it, Deepanker Verma, a software developer and security researcher, told Rest of World. CamScanner, originally launched in 2011, reportedly had more than 100 million downloads in India before the ban.

Karthika Rajmohan, associate policy counsel at Internet Freedom Foundation, a digital rights organisation, told Rest of World that to effectively implement app bans, authorities need to work with internet service providers, and that there was no public communication of such a request for CamScanner. In addition, CamScanner doesn’t require an internet connection, and accessing it despite the ban is quite easy. “The fact is that app blocking is never foolproof,” she said.

There are many alternative document scanning tools to CamScanner, including Google Drive, the iPhone camera app, Adobe, and Microsoft Lens, among others.

Kaagaz, an Indian document scanner app launched just two weeks before CamScanner was banned, received 100,000 downloads in the 24 hours after the ban, Snehanshu Gandhi, founder of the app, told Rest of World. Endorsements by India’s Ministry of Education and Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology nudged Kaagaz’s downloads up further, and the number now exceeds 30 million.

But loyalists didn’t ditch CamScanner. “Glad to not uninstall it.. it has been a life saver :),” Shalini Singh, a senior product analyst at software firm AppsForBharat, wrote on X (then Twitter) in September 2020. Singh praised the app’s ease of use, speed, UX, seamless sharing options, and file type conversions.

Several other made-in-India scanning apps that launched after the government ban, such as AIR Scanner, Carbon Scanner, and Apna Scan, are not being actively updated or have disappeared from app stores altogether.

“The brand recall of CamScanner, which has been built over I think more than a decade, is of course, very strong,” Gandhi told Rest of World.

Another problem is that the Indian government has not clearly communicated to the public why it has banned the app, according to Shruti Narayan, Asia Pacific policy counsel of Access Now, a nonprofit that reports on global internet censorship.

To implement the ban, the government used the information technology blocking rules of 2009, citing “many complaints from various sources” about data security and privacy for individuals as well as concerns about national security. Some mobile apps were “stealing and surreptitiously transmitting users’ data in an unauthorised manner to servers which have locations outside India”, the government’s press release said.

“We don’t know what the basis of these complaints were and whether they’ve been investigated. And then there is absolutely nothing in this press release about actual next steps,” Narayan told Rest of World. “If you don’t actually communicate and raise awareness about what the actual risks are, you’re not likely to have a very successful implementation because [the public will] just think it’s posturing.”

“The CamScanner blocking was a political action and less a cybersecurity one,” Raman Jit Singh Chima, Asia Pacific policy director and senior international counsel at Access Now, told Rest of World.

The US has also made politically charged plays against Chinese tech companies in recent years. The US federal government and at least 30 states banned TikTok for government officials and for government-issued devices, but not for the broader public.

Most experts agree that bans aren’t the best way to protect national security, especially when they target tech from a single nation of origin. “The way to go forward is to have policies in place that all companies, all applications have to follow,” Rajmohan said, adding that India needs to have robust national cyber security policy and data protection laws that foreign and domestic firms must comply with.

“We wanted to make a splash. We wanted to make a statement,” Rajmohan said of India’s ban. “There’s hardly any oversight to check whether or not [government workers] are using a CamScanner.”

Ananya Bhattacharya is a reporter for Rest of World covering South Asia's tech scene. She is based in Mumbai, India.

This article was originally published in Rest of World, which covers technology’s impact outside the West.