India Wants Tech Companies To Prevent Abuse And Protect User Privacy

Last week, the IP minister of India said that technology companies must prevent abuse on their platforms and protect the privacy of users. This announcement was made amidst the forming of a data privacy law and the government’s push towards the local storing of data.

Ravi Shankar Prasad, Federal Information and Technology Minister, shared that Indian users should have access to more platforms but this did not mean privacy should be undermined:

India’s massive population of 1.3 billion users, their need to have Internet access, and the consumption of data have made the country a key market for technology giants from the U.S like Amazon, Google, and Facebook.

This is not the first time the Indian government forces foreign firms to store data inside the country. Visa Inc and Mastercard Inc have already been required to do so.

This move of the Indian government has caused technology firms to worry that if they have to store data locally, the cost of investments will increase.

At the same event, Google said that its Google Pay platform, which now had over 67 million users per month, now had a new feature for job search. The platform is now arch-rival of Walmart Inc’s PhonePe, and Paytm, a service backed by SoftBank.

Google also made its AI-based voice assistant to be available to a lot more people in the country by collaborating with top telecom carriers in India.