India Doesn't Want WhatsApp's Payment Data Shared With Facebook

According to the Economic Times’s report, the government of India is concerned about data security and customer privacy as WhatsApp will launch its payment service later this year in this country.

The government has lately asked the NPCI to take care of this problem and make sure that payment services like WhatsApp or Google Pay will not share their users’ data. NPCI is the agency that operates settlement systems and retail payments in India. It also manages the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) platform.

WhatsApp’s proposed payment service is UPI-based. Recently, the communication platform owned by Facebook confirmed its plans to release a UPI-based payment service before this year ends.

WhatsApp said that its parent company, Facebook  does not plan to take WhatsApp UPI transaction data and use it for commercial purposes. But the problem is WhatsApp need the infomation comes from cloud service of Facebook. The official said: 

WhatsApp also said, to conform to the norms of data localization of Indian banking regulator, it has built a system to keep all information relating to payments in India.

WhatsApp‘s payment service will compete against the seasoned players, such as PhonePe, Paytm, and Google Pay, but WhatsApp hopes it can catch up quickly with its universal accessibility.

This isn’t the first time India has concerns about data security and privacy. Last month, the government of this country was considering creating its own Gmail and WhatsApp’s in-house versions to facilitate government agencies’ secure communications.