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Comment by oefrha | Hacker News Reader

I looked up P2P payments in India, and found this TC article from April 2019, "Amazon Pay launches peer-to-peer payments in India"[1], according to which an April 2019 launch was already a "late start":

> Amazon is getting a late start, however, when it comes to P2P payments in India. Its rivals (Paytm, Google Pay and PhonePe) already support P2P, with Google Pay in the lead.

I wonder what differentiates this offering from WhatsApp? (I guess the majority of people already establish contact on WhatsApp?)

Also, given that India semi-recently blocked some entertainment apps on national security grounds (let's assume the stated intent for the sake of the argument), I wonder if anyone in the Indian government is alarmed that U.S. megacorps hold IMO much more precious keys to the financial security of their 1.4B population?

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/29/amazon-pay-launches-peer-t...

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> Also, given that India semi-recently blocked some entertainment apps on national security grounds (let's assume the stated intent for the sake of the argument), I wonder if anyone in the Indian government is alarmed that U.S. megacorps hold IMO much more precious keys to the financial security of their 1.4B population?

Most of these payment systems are just a wrapper around GOI's UPI (which is one of the best things to come out of India in the past decade)[1]. The money remains in banks throughout the transaction. Additionally, very little of people's money is stored in digital wallets and that too for a short period of time (anecdotal). However, yes it should be a cause of concern for any country when foreign firms are tightly involved in its economic sector, and we cannot discount interventions on basis of internal security and geopolitical situations.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Payments_Interface

Good thing these foreign apps don’t have access to funds. They still have access to the transaction data, right? So they can build financial profiles on their users, as well as communications profiles (even if only metadata is available) since they dominate that market at well. Seems like a gold mine for intelligence operations. Are there laws mandating that the data has to stay on Indian servers and be insulated from the outside? Or maybe government/public sector employees can’t use these foreign services (seems unlikely)?

> They still have access to the transaction data, right? So they can build financial profiles on their users, as well as communications profiles (even if only metadata is available) since they dominate that market at well. Seems like a gold mine for intelligence operations.

Definitely. That's what they're all in for.

> Are there laws mandating that the data has to stay on Indian servers and be insulated from the outside?

GOI have started enforcing these requirements but I'm not sure where exactly the situation is right now.

> Or maybe government/public sector employees can’t use these foreign services (seems unlikely)?

Only recently these things have picked up and are considered a serious threat to the nation's security and sovereignty. The defense forces are more serious about it right now but maybe with time it'll change for other government employees too.

> I wonder what differentiates this offering from WhatsApp?

Whatsapp active users are order of magnitudes more than other platform. New users would want to save the hassle of new app, if both platforms are comparable in offerings.

> I wonder if anyone in the Indian government is alarmed that U.S. megacorps hold IMO much more precious keys to the financial security of their 1.4B population?

Nobody was alarmed at Chinese corps holding so much data. The indian govt cannot face china on the battlefield (close ties, less tech and military capabilities) so had to resort to shitty things like banning Tiktok and PUBG. The media praised the move as brilliant, when it was the worst possible thing. Instead of implementing privacy laws, they are banning apps.

India was launching Privacy Act but the Bill was changed beyond recognition through lobbying by Foreign MegaCorps particularly Facebook, Google and Amazon.

Then the govt is not really that effective as people make it to — prefers the interest of foreign mega corps before their own voters.

> Then the govt is not really that effective as people make it to.

They aren't. UPI was an exception.I'm still surprised it's this successful.

> Nobody was alarmed at Chinese corps holding so much data.

People did get alarmed after the Galwan valley incident. Banning Chinese apps might be a "shitty" thing but I would rather not have CCP easy access to the personal data of millions of Indians when the possibility of a war is very real.

Considering the whole reason whatsapp pay got delayed in launching due to data storing requirements (all data to be stored strictly in India). I think we are ok on that front for now

From what I understand it wasn't just this. WhatsApp's initial implementation of UPI was that of a walled garden. Payments could be sent/received between WhatsApp users but you couldn't send/receive payments to/from another UPI app user. They did this by hiding the UPI ID from the user. Along with WhatsApp's mass user base, this would have resulted in fragmenting the ecosystem.

I have enrolled in the beta program for WhatsApp via Google Play so I had the payment option In the new implementation since a very long time (can see a payment from July 2018). In their new implementation they have exposed the UPI ID so compatibility with other UPI apps is ensured. For transactions with other WhatsApp users you need not bother with UPI ID. This dual approach is the same as that of Google Pay.

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