As Google’s Head of Trust and Safety, Arjun Narayan is tasked with protecting consumers and partners from online threats, including fraud and abuse, and with rigidly enforcing policies to keep Google’s platforms and ecosystem safe and secure for participants. Excerpts from a recent interaction in Singapore:

What lessons does Google draw from Facebook’s recent experience of data breach?

What Facebook is going through is not an issue on our platform. We have a long history of being great custodians of data. We value user privacy and security. For that ecosystem to thrive, we make sure that advertisers, publishers and consumers all feel safe and secure.

Doesn’t the Facebook scandal warrant any tweaks of your value algorithms, any policy reviews?

We all have lessons to learn. We are watching the space, but we do what is right for our user irrespective of whether these things are in the news or not. We maintain very high standards: our business model depends on that. So we cannot take things lightly. But Google’s users are different from Facebook’s. We are very execution-focussed, we make content available for the user at the time the user needs the information. We’re not in the ‘viral business’. So there are differentiators.

Do your core values – say, a commitment to freedom of expression – occasionally come in conflict with your commercial interests?

We are guided by our values; they define who we are. It’s not easy: there is an inherent tension balancing those values. Yes, we are in business, but more important, we want to be true to our DNA, our values. It’s always values first; commercial interests follow. That’s our North Star. This goes back to our core philosophy, which is ‘follow the user, do the right thing, do no evil.’ Everything else follows.

How specifically does Google protect the ecosystems from wilful abuse?

For Google’s ad-supported open free web to thrive, it needs to be a safe and effective place. But negative experiences – either one-off accidents or systematic abuse by scammers – have hurt the ecosystem. For the past 17 years, we have invested in people, policies and technology to make this a safe, secure and happy ecosystem. There are three pieces to our ads ecosystem: advertisers, publishers, and consumers. Advertisers help publishers monetise their content; publishers help advertisers find and connect with audiences that are relevant; and none of this will be possible without consumers. Keeping a balance in the ecosystem is complex, but we stay guided by our values.

We increasingly rely on technology as a means to take down bad ads and bad publishers. In 2017, we took down 3.2 billion bad ads, or 100 bad ads per seconds. We also removed 3.2 lakh publishers from our ad network, blocked 90,000 websites and took action against seven lakh mobile apps for policy violations. Our work in protecting our ecosystem is constant and ongoing.

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