Google released a major update on its payments platforms, Google Pay. The company today announced that it will soon roll out a new feature called “Personalisation within Google Pay” in its payments platform. This feature will give users a broader set of controls to decide what happens to their Google Pay data.
“Starting next week, your Google Pay app settings will provide you with more controls to decide how your Google Pay activity is used to personalise features within the app,” Google wrote in a blog post.
With this feature, users will not only get more relevant offers and rewards based on their activity within Google Pay, but they will also be able to modify their personalisation experience based on their preferences better. Google says even with this setting turned off, Google Pay will continue to work just as well – sans personalisation.
The biggest and perhaps the most noteworthy thing about this update is that now users will be able to view and delete individual transactions and activity records that you don’t want to be used.
Ambarish Kenghe, vice president-product, Google Pay, in the blog post noted that the new personalisation features will allow users to restrict Google from accessing their transaction history or share them with third parties. Based on the settings that users opt for, Google Pay will send them prompts or ads thus giving them a “personalised experience.” Users can also opt-out of this feature if they want to see any prompts or ads at all.
“We are committed to do more and are excited to announce the next big step towards giving you more choice and control to manage your transaction data on Google Pay. Starting next week, your Google Pay app settings will provide you with more controls to decide how your Google Pay activity is used to personalise features within the app.
All users will be asked to choose whether they would like to turn the control on or off as soon as they upgrade to the next version of the Google Pay app,” Kenghe said. He further noted that a user’s personal information is never sold to anyone and your transaction history is not shared with any other Google product for targeting ads.
At present, the current policy of the payments app of Google does not encourage the tech behemoth to sell transaction data to third-party services or sharing it with other Google services for targeted advertisements.
It is worth noting that the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) mandates Google to store UPI transaction data for up to 10 years on servers located in the country. The financial daily quoted Kenghe as saying, “There is a lot of discussion in India around privacy and data protection. Privacy of customers is a key focus at Google and we are taking it a step further for financial transactions by giving customers more control.
He emphasised that the company is putting its “users in the driver’s seat to manage their data and privacy with easy-to-use privacy features and controls.”India’s UPI market is dominated by Walmart-owned PhonePe and Google Pay, and in January, PhonePe did 968 million transactions whereas Google Pay processed 853 million payments.
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