Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

According to news in the morning of April 7, Beijing time, recently, as the manager of Android ecology, Google has been criticized for conniving at the misbehavior of the application software of the online lending platform and collecting data on consumers' mobile phones for harassment and extortion. It is reported that Google has begun to take measures to crack down on these lending apps, banning them from accessing address books, photos, geographic locations and other information on borrowers' mobile phones.

Google announced on Wednesday that it will introduce new rules on the behavior of personal financial services software in the Play app store by the end of May, when apps that provide personal loan services may not be able to access personal information such as users' contacts and photos.

Details provided by Google to Android software developers show that the lending software will later restrict access to information such as the location, local phone number and video content of users' phones, the first time a Google store has imposed such restrictions.

Google's revamped personal financial services software includes personal loans, payday loans (short-term loans for one to two weeks) and P2P online lending software, but does not include home mortgages, car loans and credit card-related software.

Previous studies have found that hundreds of personal financial services apps in Google's Play store overcollect personal information, requiring access to extremely private information on users' phones. The software claims that such private data is necessary for personal credit checks or risk assessments. In this way, the consent of the user can often be obtained.

However, in countries such as India and Mexico, some Android phone users have reported that they have been violated by financial services apps, such as some lending platforms that use tampered personal photos for extortion, or even obtain information from address books to harass friends and relatives.

Some financial services software is actually "taking advantage of people's danger". At present, in many countries, with increasing inflation, rising energy prices and rising living costs, some users are in a hurry to get loans and often agree to the over-collection of personal privacy requirements by lending platforms.

At the end of last year, Lookout, a cyber security company, conducted a study that found that there are about 250 Android financial services apps around the world that overcollect personal privacy data and harass debt collection. The financial software has been downloaded more than 1500 times and currently covers Africa, Southeast Asia, India, Colombia and Mexico.

The company also found 35 problematic lending apps in Apple's App Store. After Lookout's research report was released, Apple and Google removed the problematic software from their respective app stores.

Google officially did not comment on the new round of rectification. It is reported that the Google Store has previously blocked all lending software with a loan maturity of less than 60 days.

Online lending platform is growing rapidly all over the world, and many countries have also introduced new policies to regulate and rectify them. In the u.s. market, Google and apple have banned all loansharking software with annual interest rates of 36% or more. The two companies have also introduced restrictions in India, Indonesia, Nigeria, Kenya and Pakistan.

It is reported that Android currently accounts for 70% of the global smartphone operating system market, and is expected to have as many as 3 billion active users worldwide, including a large number of mobile phone users in the Chinese market.

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