If you didn’t like the fact that Google seems to be using your activity on Google Pay to push ads, offers, and rewards to you, we have good news for you. Well, it’s good if you live in India. The tech giant has announced that they are bringing better privacy controls to Google Pay users in India. This means you can turn off the personalization feature so Google cannot use your data and activity to personalize your experience on the app.
Google says that starting next week, once you update to the latest version of Google Pay, you will be asked to choose whether they want to turn the control on or off. If you choose to turn on the “Personalization with Google Pay”, you will get more relevant offers and rewards that are tailor-fit to you. This is based on your Google Pay activity and transaction history, which makes a lot of people uncomfortable at times, having that data out there.
If you turn it off, then Google will not be able to use that data to make the Google Pay experience more personalized. You will still get recommendations and offers but it’s more general rather than personalized. You can also manage individual transactions and activities within Google Pay by visiting your Google account. You can view the transactions and delete the specific ones that you don’t want them to be used for personalization.
While personalization is nice, not everyone wants to give Google access to things like forms of payment, transaction history, etc. That’s why they’re making it optional and giving users more options when it comes to managing their privacy. Google also wants to assure users that their personal data is not shared with other Google products. And of course, your personal information is not sold to any entity.
This announcement was made on the Google India website so it seems to be an India only feature for now. No News if it will eventually be available to other countries.
