Hansen said India is particularly important, for instance, because in 2021, 30% of all transactions were digital, making India the number one country globally in terms of digital transactions. The flip side, however, is that this requires a robust cybersecurity mechanism.
“This makes it incredibly important that we do our job at Google and bake security in by default, make things private by design and keep people and businesses safe through all of these transformations,” he said.
“In India, the numbers are staggering. Just the first quarter of 2022 saw 18 million cyberattacks and 200,000 threats a day. It’s reached a level where it is not really a question of whether an individual or a business will be attacked, but how well they’ll be prepared.”
Naming cybersecurity as one of the top issues facing the world, Google launched a broad, multi-pronged effort to protect people from online harm through an array of new programmes, initiatives, collaborations and investments in India. The company said these efforts were aimed at strengthening the collective capability of the country’s growing digital economy from cyber threats.
Google also announced a cybersecurity upskilling program for about 100,000 developers, and IT and startup professionals across the country, in addition to a multilingual user awareness campaign – supported by MeitY and Digital India Corporation – to encourage millions of internet users to adopt better practices for safer digital transactions.
Discover the stories of your interest
It also announced the first-ever digital safety-focused grants totalling $2 million (about Rs 16 crore) from Google.org in India, to non profit organisations including Collective Good Foundation, Point Of View and HelpAge India. These, the company said, will enable “high-risk groups such as women, micro entrepreneurs, seniors, and the LGBTQIA+ community to leverage the opportunity of the internet with safety and confidence”.
As part of Google’s attempt to ‘bake in security,’ Hansen said that in 2021, the company enrolled 150 million accounts for two-step verification or multi-factor authentication seamlessly, thus reducing their risk of being hijacked by 50%.
He said, “We are fundamentally an internet company. We invest in open source, we invest in the internet, we want to make the ecosystem safer. I think it’s particularly important in the context of India, where you’re growing and embracing so many of the opportunities of a digital economy and, in some cases, leapfrogging others.”
