In the Q2 earnings conference of Google held on Thursday, Google CEO Sundar Pichai not only shared revenue figures but also gave users assurance of something critical. Data is of utmost value in today’s time and it is very important to understand where your data goes. Also, it is equally important to have control over what data you send out.
Sundar Pichai’s focus in the conference was mainly on data security. In Q2, Google announced that they will improve data security and privacy by giving users clear instructions about where their data will go. Google is planning to make privacy controls easy and accessible to each and every Google application starting from Google Maps to Gmail.
The main focus of Google nowadays is to help users understand where their data is going and how they can take control of their own data. Google has been in a hard place recently defending itself from regulatory pushes in the US and a few other places. Google’s social networking platform, Google+ was removed from the internet in April this year. This move was inspired by the two big data leaks on the platform that occurred last year.
Approximately 52 million users were impacted by the data leak. Google released a statement saying that a bug negatively impacted the Google+ API. The bug was carried by a Google+ update. Indian Government has taken some concrete steps to make sure that the data of Indian users stay safe in India and abroad as well. The Indian Government drafted an e-commerce policy that focused on various data localization aspects. RBI is asked to revise its data localization rules and to make sure that data of Indian users stay in India only. In 2018, RBI collected data on payment systems in India to be store in India.
Google wants to create a product that helps them to create a better product for the people by using their data. Sundar Pichai mentioned that Google is working on technology that doesn’t need user data to become helpful. Also, they are working on a federal learning technique that allows AI models to be trained by Google so that they don’t depend on user data to perform better.
About 50 of the new features in Android Q are being built around data security and privacy. These features will help to protect user data against misuse by apps. Despite the data leaks, Google reported an upward trend in its revenue. Google’s revenue increased by around 20% after the data leak.
