Google Unveils Safety Charter in India to Combat Digital Scams
Mumbai, June 17 (PTI): In a bid to strengthen its efforts in AI-led fraud detection and combat rising digital scams across India, Google has unveiled its Safety Charter in the country.
According to Google, fraudulent transactions related to Unified Payments Interface (UPI) grew by 85% year-over-year to nearly $11 billion last year. The company aims to address these threats through its new charter.
Addressing a packed audience comprising media ecosystem partners and government representatives, Heather Adkins, Vice President of Engineering, Google Security said that the threat landscape is moving at machine speed and hence must be reacted at machine speed as well.
The Safety Charter is built on three fundamental pillars: protecting end users from online fraud, ensuring cybersecurity for governments and organizations at the enterprise level, and building AI in a responsible and ethical way. In India, it comes into effect with these goals in mind, addressing an increasingly complex digital threat landscape.
Google has revealed its improved threat detection capabilities using Gemini to the audience. With this capability, Google says it can improve threat identification by 300 percent, similar to having “a super-fast detective that sifts through layers of information”.
According to sources, as a part of its efforts under this charter, Google Pay issued nearly 41 million warnings in relation to suspected scams last quarter alone on the company’s platform.
Google Messages too boasts an ability to help users from over 500 million suspicious messages. Meanwhile, the Play Protect program has successfully prevented attempts to install high risk apps and blocked the installation of over 220000 unique malicious apps across over 13 million devices.
To support the launch of its Safety Charter in India, Google will also collaborate with government agencies such as the Ministry of Home Affairs' Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C).
A team member of Google’s security department spoke about how AI becomes important when the human task has days or weeks to figure out.