3,500 loan applications are penalised by Google for violating Play Store rules.

On Thursday, Google announced that it has taken action against more than 3,500 loan applications in India in 2022 due to violations of Play Store policies. Google added that it blocked 173,000 abusive accounts and stopped 1.43 million policy-violating apps from being uploaded to Google Play.

The business claims to have halted dishonest and abusive transactions totaling over $2 billion in 2022. The business also stated that it regularly modifies its policies and review processes in order to improve its strategy in this field.

Google changed its policy on personal loans earlier this month, stating that applications that offer or help with personal loans will only have limited access to users' sensitive information.

Their contacts, whereabouts, images, videos, files, and phone logs are all included in the data. On May 31, 2023, the updated policy went into force.

The Indian government, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), and the Directorate of Enforcement are extremely concerned about the rise of unlicensed and fraudulent apps that engage in digital lending (ED).

This problem dates back to 2020, when several of these apps used aggressive loan recovery tactics and charged exorbitant interest rates while lending money to unwary users, which caused many people to commit suicide.

Google changed the requirements for financial services applications in the Play Store developer programme in 2021 and added new requirements for personal loan apps in India. The filing of a declaration form is one of these requirements. It certifies that the app is either licenced by the RBI to offer personal loans and provides a copy of the licence, or alternatively, that it only serves as a platform for facilitating lending by licenced lenders.

Google revealed its intentions to introduce a more privacy-conscious advertising strategy in 2023 in the interim. The business will launch the first Android Privacy Sandbox Beta, which will only be available for a select subset of Android devices.

Google stated in a blog post that "with the Beta, consumers and developers will be able to experience and evaluate these novel solutions in the real world." The business added that it would collaborate closely with publishers, regulators, developers, and other key parties to steer the transition to a more secure mobile ecosystem.