Ads are coming to Google Pay in India — but there’s a fix

Google will allow you to decide if you want your activity within the app to be used for “personalized features.”

What you need to know

• Google Pay users in India will start seeing personalized ads within the app starting next week.
• Google claims “Personalization within Google Pay” will deliver a more tailored experience to users.
• Fortunately, you can choose to turn the control off as soon as your upgrade to the next version of the app.

The revamped Google Pay app finally exited beta last week and is soon expected to become available in several countries around the world. Ahead of the global rollout, Google has announced that users in the country will see a new “Personalization within Google Pay” option when they update the app on both Android and iOS next week.

Google says the new option will provide users with a “more tailored experience within Google Pay.” If users decide to turn on the option, Google will show more relevant offers and rewards based on their transaction history and other activity within the app.

Ambarish Kenghe, Vice President – Product, Google Pay, wrote in a blog post:

We sincerely hope that people will appreciate the ability to easily see and control how their data is used, and enjoy delightful product experiences irrespective of the choices they make on Google Pay. As India embraces digital payments, we remain committed to bringing the industry along to ensure that we keep raising the bar to deploy state-of-the-art data security and privacy measures and put the users in-charge of how their data is used.

Along with Personalization within Google Pay, users will also be able to manage how their individual transactions and activity within the app are used for serving personalized offers by heading to account.google.com. In case you don’t want Google to “personalize your Google Pay experience,” you will be able to delete all your individual transactions and activity records from the page.

In addition to being one of Google’s best Android apps, Google Pay is also among the most popular mobile payment apps in India. As per data from the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), Google Pay accounted for nearly 37% of all UPI transactions in the country in January 2021.