Google Pay sharing payment data with group companies: Paytm to NPCI

BENGALURU: After crying foul over WhatsApp’s payments feature, Paytm has trained its guns on Google weeks after the global tech giant announced big plans for its payments platform Google Pay.

The country’s largest digital payments company has raised concerns that Google is sharing the payments data of Indian consumers with affiliate companies and third-party users. Citing Google’s privacy policy, Paytm has written to the National Payments Corporation of India to look into the matter urgently.


“Google Pay, which is an unregulated platform, has the scope of using their customers’ data for their monetary gains with complete disregard for the users’ need for privacy,” Paytm wrote in a letter addressed to NPCI chief executive Dilip Asbe. ET has seen a copy of the letter.

Paytm also said that Google sharing and storing user data outside India presented “severe security implications in case of a data breach.” It added that even as India is framing its data protection laws, Google is being allowed to share data with group companies and other third-party entities outside India.

“Recently, WhatsApp was directed to stop sharing users’ data with its parent company, Facebook. In light of this, it is disconcerting that Google Pay is sharing its users’ critical personal data with Google, group companies, payment participants…”

Responding to the Paytm letter, Google said that it does not do share UPI data in a written reply to ET queries.

“Google Pay users have a direct relationship with Google - as per Google Pay terms of service a Google Account is opened with Google LLC. A common Google Account allows for checks and controls required for managing risk, fraud, spam and for enhancing security measures, that are applied across Google products. It runs as a common thread across Google products allowing for seamlessness of service that a user can avail of and benefit from. Google does not use any individual UPI transactions data for any monetization purpose e.g. for advertisements,” said a Google spokesperson.

Unified Payments Interface, the payments railroad developed by NPCI, has allowed global technology companies to offer payment services to Indian consumers in partnership with banks. This has led to a severe battle for market share between Indian-born payment entities such as Paytm on one side and global companies like Google and WhatsApp on the other.

When WhatsApp, the most widely used messaging app in the country, introduced its payments feature in February for limited users, Paytm founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma said he would approach NPCI over what he termed an unfair playing field accorded to the global company.

Another tech company, Truecaller, which was recently rocked by privacy concerns globally, also offers payment services in India. However, since its offering has hardly showed traction among Indian consumers, it has not attracted the attention of competing Indian companies.

Data sharing however is a common theme across payment platforms, but the extent to which the user data is shared varies, as per the privacy policy put up by these players on their websites. ET recently looked into the details around their policies and showed that every payment company needs to share some amount of user data for transaction purposes. Also sometimes companies share data for promotional purposes and fraud detection as well.

PhonePe claims to be sharing data with its corporate affiliates, which could be Flipkart. Paytm itself said that it shares data only on a ‘need to know’ basis. Industry experts said that with India not having a robust data protection policy in place yet, companies are allowed to share user data with user consent.

Citing the need to ensure the privacy of Indians who are adopting digital payments, Paytm said all payments companies should be on a level playing field.

While Google as a third-party service provider is not directly controlled by Reserve Bank, other entities such as digital wallets and payment banks are controlled by the Reserve Bank of India under its payment policies.