US tells India it is mulling caps on H1Bs to deter data rules

Every business, no matter the size, accepted mobile payments (usually PayTM, but I saw support for PhonePe, Zeta and others). The US is super behind on this; very, very, very few retailers accept Square Cash, more accept PayPal, none of them accept those payments easily. Any app that does mobile banking requires KYC verification. For mobile payments, usually support soft KYC, which you can easily fake, but only lasts 180 days. For anything else online banking related, hard (in-person) KYC was required.

Every terminal supported credit/debit cards (though using international cards was a crap-shoot, and AMEX even more so) and all of them expected Chip + PIN. People were legitimately surprised when they saw that I had to sign. Some didn't even ask for the signature because they weren't used to it.

Everything in India uses SMS OTP and requires an India phone number to receive it. This was super annoying before getting a Indian SIM card, but once I did, I realized how nice of a system this was.

There were many things about the India experience that I wasn't a fan of; paying for stuff was definitely not one of htem.

NPCI is a not-for-profit organization which is a consortium of banks and is promoted by the Reserve Bank of India. And these guys absolutely kill it. I moved from India to the US last year and payments are overall so much more complicated here. I have to download a third party app and even my bank, at least as far as I can tell, doesn't have a straightforward mechanism to transfer money to other people without using Zelle.

NPCI came up with IMPS, which is also what UPI is partially built upon I think. IMPS worked for basically every bank and you could transfer to every other bank instantly, usually via that bank's app or website. UPI almost took it to an IM-ing money level.

> Transferring money from one personal account to any new account (adding a beneficiary account) would take more than 4 hours.

NEFT, which has been around for a long time before IMPS and UPI came, would transfer money in about an hour's time. For larger transactions, RTGS would transfer within a few minutes. I agree that UPI is a lot faster, but it comes with lower transfer limits. Four hours for a transfer through NEFT or RTGS could be extreme cases, since RBI has some tightly stipulated deadlines for credit to the receiver's account for both (you can check RBI's website for more information).

> - Transferring money doesn't have any extra charges

Well, UPI transactions do have fees, depending on the bank. IIRC Kotak introduced or was set to introduce charges for it. The rest of them would've followed, since NPCI is not a government organization (like RBI), but a private consortium of banks. But RBI's recent notification removing transaction charges for NEFT and RTGS (which are owned and run on RBI) may have given pause to banks wanting to charge for UPI.

> - Safe, transaction can be done only from mobile which is linked with bank.

The "only" needs to be removed here. UPI transactions can be done from mobile, but can also be done from any computer or device with a browser if one has online banking and the particular bank supports UPI over that.

> There is no need to give personal information, one can provide UPI address or Virtual UPI address.

Your (recipient's) real name would still be visible to the payer on the payment confirmation screen. I consider name also as personal information, if you really want to remove all real identifiers from transactions and make it seem like it's anonymous.

Not entirely true, India has made payments cubersome to make a transfer through visa/mc, you need to go through lengthy 3d verification even then some cards are issued with International transaction disabled and there is no way to enable it on those card without changing your card to International debit card.

There is no way to purchase anything from an international website using UPI or Rupay card or many issued debit cards.

Secondly, getting merchant services to process foreign card is not easy and this makes building SaaS in India impossible unless you happen to be among few lucky people who have American companies registered to their name.

India needs to get rid of these protectionist policies and I've no idea why America doesn't put more pressure on India to open itself up to international market, not only does it improve quality of life of people of India but also enables local people to have quality tools through which they can produce better output.

Get all quality hardware/electronics/tools gadget at the price without any import duties or taxes and local makers win.

If Indians vote for me, I remove custom duties from electronics then from machineries and finally I remove tax from food items because there is only so much a person can eat. I don't understand why food items have to have taxes.

Right now, India is trapped in hand of few politically supported corporate houses who have all power to exploit Indian resources but closed to foreign companies.

If either way people of India loose, it's better to lose with multiple options in your hand.

America can easily make India change its way, put large tarrif on software outsourcing which goes to India and demand removal of traffic placed on Chinese/American goods.

Remove that crap policy which demands you must have Indian stake in corporation before you can setup shop in India because anyone can go go America and setup shop there, so why India is some special snowflake?

Indians can't buy German tools because and they've to do with locally made shoddy tools which results in crap quality of output.

This will not change in India why? Because every major political party depends on those industrial houses for their money and won't do anything which threatens their existence.

When people ask me why Ambani is so rich, what exactly did he invent or what exactly are they do which is comparable to world class production. I tell them they are rich because India is a protectionist country.

I am not from India but living in India for quite sometime before I lived in china and before that in Europe.

I see lots of desire in Indian people to make their work and life better but all tools are made twice as expensive as a result they are stuck with low quality local options who enrich few of the industrial houses who are in bed with political parties of India.

Seriously, this UPI mechanism is absolutely killer.

Countries can already demand any business records of their citizens from a business as a condition of doing business in that country or citizens.

The US requires that any fin business that does business with US Citizens report to the United States government or be cut off from the US financial system. A lot of international banks responded by closing the accounts of Americans rather than deal with the costs of compliance.

Yes, because it directly affects the business of large outsourcing companies. It also drops remittances, one of the largest sources of dollars for India.

No, because for many decades, India has been trying to keep their smartest citizens to build their own country. Making local companies, serving at local hospitals, teaching at local schools and universities. They want their own Google, Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, Adobe instead of Indian citizens working in the US for US corporations. They were just unsuccessful for so many years because countries like US drained the well-educated so much.

Ultimately, this will be a great deal for India. India doesn't want remittances. They want their own companies to make software that the world wants to buy.

But in practice, it's not that simple. US businesses do well largely because our market is not nearly as corrupted by politics the way things are in India. Chinese companies do well because the communist party cracks down on corruption with brutal force. But in India? Corruption is how work is done. There are real stability issues at play and they manifest themselves even in the elite companies and institutions. This is the same country that almost sank its own nuclear submarine because someone left a hatch open...

So yeah, it sounds nice to keep Indian workers in India, but without a political landscape that is stable enough to support something like an Indian Silicon Valley and earn the trust of investors, there's no guarantee they will offset the loss of US remittances on the current H1B workers.

HIPAA doesn't talk about US citizens or distinguish different types of records based on any properties of the people that those records cover. The words citizen do not appear in HIPAA or HITECH. HIPAA applies to any records by covered entities, which is what it discusses, regardless of who those records refer to.

There is no requirement in HIPAA that PII must be stored in the US. This is such basic info it's in the HIPAA FAQ from HHS https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/special-topics/c.... Question 9 is unequivocal, you can store data outside of the US, but you need to think about any dangers or risks associated with this. Which is totally logical.

There are lots of reasons to have issues with the US. But not what you're talking about.

This is not about consumer privacy. This is about corporate profit. Visa, Mastercard and other US banks want to maintain fewer datacenters around the world. They already have them in the US (because US law) and they possibly also feed that data to US govt.

With such localization laws, US corporations are having to invest in other countries. They are lobbying to bully other countries for profit and this administration is ready to support profits at any cost.

The co-founder of Paytm (the CEO's brother) has been caught on video saying that it can provide all its customers' information in exchange for money. Oyo Rooms decided to funnel all hotel guest information to local police directly regardless of whether there was a crime or not and if the police requested for some data or not. There are many such instances where data privacy is not valued at all.

I would double down and say if you do that, I will ban all H1Bs from leaving the country. Let's see how Trump and Silicon Valley feels about that.