For India to become Viksit Bharat, the country must build and maintain trust in the Internet and its digital infrastructure, search giant Google has said on Tuesday.

“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,” Preeti Lobana, Vice President and Country Manager, Google India, said.

This scalable capability helps the company narrow or even eliminate the gap between defenders and attackers, which represents a huge leap forward in security, she added.

As part of its ongoing efforts to ensure the safety and security of all users online, Google unveiled its Safety Charter for India’s AI-led transformation, at the “Safer with Google India Summit”, focusing on creating a safer online environment and empowering users, businesses, and governments while building AI responsibly.

The company also informed that under its Digikavach programme, 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 six-crore high-risk app installation attempts across 13 million devices, it said.

Google Pay has also issued 4.1 crore scam transaction alerts and 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 ₹13,000 crore in financial fraud during 2024, it added.

“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,” Heather Adkins, Vice President of Engineering, Google Security, said.

Published on June 17, 2025