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Google Pay India, the online payments app, providing Unified Payments Services (UPI), has announced a new feature focusing on user privacy. The new feature is a 'toggle on and off' button allowing its users to forbid sharing transactional information with the company and not allowing them to use data for a personalized experience within the application. The users can opt between personalized experience and privacy while using the Google Pay application.
According to Google Pay India's top executive, Google Pay does not share any user information with the parent company Google, following the Indian regulations and protecting the privacy of users.
Moreover, Google Inc. is considering stopping the advertisements based on the browsing history of users. The move indicates that the company is looking into user privacy by not tracking them across websites, although it is completely opposite to its current business model. Still, there is an option in which one can opt to turn off the personalized advertisement option, although it will not stop the trackers. According to DuckDuckGo research, Google trackers were found on 75% of the top million websites.
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| Google will stop its ad tracking technology |
Now, based on media reports, the tech giant will probably stop using its ad tracking technology that follows users across the internet using cookies. The decision could be taken under pressure from the US regulators and protesting and concerned users across the globe for their privacy.
Despite these privacy-protecting moves, the company can face problems across countries tracking citizens with a view to following their digital footprint. There are good intentions from the government's side to hinder cyber crimes as well as protecting national security. However, there is a disadvantage as the governments can use the power to their advantage placing citizens' privacy at risk.
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| Google transparency report |
According to Google's transparency report, the company answered over 150,000 official requests in 2019 from authorities to provide one's personal data. Between January 2020 to June 2020, the company received 103,822 such requests for 235,499 accounts. Such requests from the governments increased over the years as shown on Google's website.
Google is facing criticism and lawsuits from all over the world for its poor terms of privacy and data mismanagement. Even facing lawsuits for tracking its users and sharing information with third-party businesses using the 'incognito mode' as a US court has recently ordered the company to face a class-action lawsuit seeking $5 billion from claimer for tracking and collecting data, as reported by Business Standard. Despite these lawsuits, the company has always been settled the cases as it is too big to fail. Some European nations have introduced data and privacy laws to protect internet users from data collecting companies. Additionally, representatives and politicians from democratic nations such as India, the USA, and France have given statements concerning the data privacy of internet users. These kinds of major and short-tempered attacks have put great pressure on the big tech giants such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter to change the privacy policies.