Google unveils safety charter for India's AI-led transformation

New Delhi [India], June 17 (ANI): Google on Tuesday unveiled its Safety Charter for India's AI-led transformation, at the "Safer with Google India Summit", focusing on the company's deep commitment to creating a safer online environment and empowering users, businesses, and governments while building AI responsibly.
The strategic blueprint operates through three foundational pillars-- keeping end users safe from online frauds and scams; strengthening cybersecurity for government and enterprise infrastructure; and building AI responsibly.
Under its Digikavach program, Google has reached over 177 million Indians with AI-powered protections and awareness initiatives to combat financial fraud.
AI integration across its platforms is transforming threat detection--Search now identifies 20x more scam-related pages; impersonation attacks on customer service and government sites have dropped by over 80 per cent and 70 per cent, respectively.
Google Messages blocks over 500 million scam texts monthly and has issued more than 2.5 billion suspicious link warnings via on-device AI.
Since its October 2024 pilot in India, Google Play Protect has blocked nearly 6 crore high-risk app installation attempts across 13 million devices.
Google Pay has issued 4.1 crore scam transaction alerts.
Gmail continues to protect over 2.5 billion inboxes globally, automatically blocking more than 99.9 per cent of spam, phishing, and malware.
By combining AI-powered threat detection across platforms with cross-sector intelligence sharing and proactive policy measures, Google has already demonstrated significant impact, including Google Pay averting Rs 13,000 crore in financial fraud during 2024.
Google is enhancing cybersecurity through an AI-first, secure-by-design approach focused on early threat detection and intelligence sharing.
The Google Cloud M-Trends report offers insights into key attack trends, while Project Zero, in collaboration with DeepMind, marked a global first--using AI to discover previously unknown memory-safety flaws in widely used software like SQLite.
To strengthen the broader ecosystem, Google.org has committed an additional USD 5 million to The Asia Foundation, expanding the APAC Cybersecurity Fund to support 10+ new cyber-clinics, including partnerships with Indian universities to train MSMEs and students. In parallel, Google announced a collaboration with IIT-Madras in advancing Post-Quantum Cryptography, developing next-gen anonymous tokens that enable secure, privacy-first digital interactions for the future.
Preeti Lobana, Vice President and Country Manager, Google India, said, "For India to become Viksit Bharat, we must build and maintain trust in the internet and our digital infrastructure. Trust is the bedrock of our digital aspirations and the reason India's digital economy has become an engine of growth. At Google, safety isn't an afterthought--it's embedded in our design principles, engineering processes, and company culture. Our AI systems constantly evolve to detect new threats and scams, even recognising malicious patterns in attacks that have never been seen before. This scalable capability helps us narrow or even eliminate the gap between defenders and attackers, which represents a huge leap forward in security."
Heather Adkins, Vice President of Engineering, Google Security, highlighted, "India's digital journey continues to unlock incredible opportunities, but we also see the rise of sophisticated online threats evolving at machine speed. Our Safety Charter represents a comprehensive blueprint where AI isn't just narrowing the gap between attackers and defenders--it's eliminating it in some cases. AI has four incredible superpowers that are reversing the defender's dilemma with its reasoning, learning, speed and scale. We've used AI to discover previously unknown vulnerabilities in real-world software before attackers can exploit them. This defensive potential is game-changing, demonstrating how AI can serve as a tireless, transformative force keeping platforms and users secure." (ANI)