Cybersecurity as a default setting

Various measures are coming into place by government, tech platforms, phone makers, and telecom companies to screen fraud calls

- Sugandha Mukherjee

IT BEGINS, OFTEN, with a familiar voice or logo. A bail demand from a police officer on a video call. A cashback link masquerading as Paytm. An email from a senior colleague (spoofed, of course) urgently asking for your Amazon Pay credentials. In India, digital scams don't feel like crime. The country is not only fertile ground for fraud, it is also a testbed for its most scalable forms—multilingual, mobile-first, hyperlocal.

Now, the response is changing. In June, Google announced a new Cybersecurity Safety Alliance Charter, built specifically for India, its largest market outside the U.S. It's not a product, but a framework that integrates artificial intelligence-led protections into Android, Chrome, and the Play Store to detect scams before users encounter them. The shift marks a move away from user responsibility, password managers, antivirus software, scam literacy, and toward something quieter—which is an automatic protection. There are no apps to install, no toggles to switch.

Defence by designAt the heart of Google's initiative is real-time fraud detection on Chrome, capable of scanning URLs as they're clicked, flagging phishing attempts and blocking malicious redirects. The Play Store now applies tighter scrutiny to financial apps, especially loan providers, and new AI models are being deployed to identify deepfakes and synthetic media.