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...

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