Google Pay to give users greater control over financial data, says company

Starting next week, the Google Pay app settings will provide users with more controls to decide how their Google Pay activity is used to personalise features within the app

Tech giant Google is giving users more choice and control to manage their transaction data on its payments platform, saying it is improving "control and transparency".

Google Pay, from next week, will let users to personalise features and choose whether they would like to turn controls on or off when they upgrade to the next version of the app.

“We know that safety and privacy are paramount for payments products and services, and people want more control and transparency on how their transaction data is used,” said Ambarish Kenghe, vice president - product, Google Pay, in a blog post, on Thursday. “In line with this commitment, your financial and transaction information on Google Pay has always been governed by your consent. Your personal information is never sold to anyone and your transaction history is not shared with any other Google product for targeting ads.”

Turning on “Personalisation within Google Pay'' will provide a more tailored experience within Google Pay. For example, users would receive more relevant offers and rewards based on their activity within Google Pay, including transaction history. Even with this setting turned off, Google Pay will continue to work just as well--only without personalisation. Users who update Google Pay on Android and iOS can access these controls to modify their personalisation experience on Google Pay based on their preference.

Users will also be able to manage how their individual transactions and activity within Google Pay are used for personalisation by visiting account.google.com. Here one can view and delete individual transactions and activity records that you don’t want used to personalise your Google Pay experience.

Kenghe said every day billions of people put their trust in Google to keep their data secure and their information private. “We don’t take this trust for granted, and work hard to ensure that people are able to understand and manage their data and make privacy choices that are right for them,” said Kenghe. “We do this by putting our users in the driver’s seat to manage their data and privacy with easy-to-use privacy features and controls.”

As India embraces digital payments, Kenghe said Google remain committed to bringing the industry along to ensure that it keeps raising the bar. This includes deploying state-of-the-art data security and privacy measures and put the users in-charge of how their data is used.

Walmart-owned PhonePe and Google Pay have the lion’s share of the unified payments interface (UPI) market. PhonePe did 968 million transactions in January whereas Google Pay processed 853 million payments. Paytm reportedly did about 281 million payments on UPI whereas Amazon Pay did 46 million.