Safer Internet Day 2025: Staying Ahead and keeping the ecosystem safe

Our mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. However, the internet, with its vast potential for connection and growth, also presents challenges. Cyber threats are becoming increasingly sophisticated, and it’s more important than ever to empower users with the knowledge and tools they need to navigate this digital landscape safely.

To this end, under DigiKavach, Google’s charter to mitigate financial frauds and online scams, we launched the DigiKavach 'Mauka Gawao' campaign, to raise awareness about common financial scams related to seemingly compelling jobs, investments, and loan opportunities that are, in fact, too good to be true. The campaign has thus far touched 177 million Indians and counting.

The critical work of facilitating online safety and user awareness requires a multi-front effort and to that end, our approach is organised along three crucial axes - securing our own products and platforms, forming cross-industry collaborations and lastly, empowering ecosystem partners to widen the footprint of this work.

Securing our own products and platforms

Late last year, we announced the Enhanced Play Protect program to protect users from app-based security threats. The results from the program have been very encouraging:

• In India, the pilot reached 50% coverage by January 21, 2025 after being launched in November 2024. As of January 31, 2025, it has blocked over 13.9 million installation attempts of potentially harmful apps, protecting 3.2 million devices. This translates to over 309,000 unique apps prevented from being installed on these devices.

Globally:

• Enhanced real-time protection: Scanned over 200 billion apps daily and identified over 13 million new malicious apps outside of Google Play using Google Play Protect.
• Blocked harmful apps: Successfully blocked over 2.36 million policy-violating apps from ever reaching Google Play.
• Removed malicious actors: Banned over 158,000 developer accounts globally that attempted to publish harmful apps.

In addition, over the last year, we displayed warnings, blocked risky transactions and removed potentially suspicious content from our surfaces that could be scammy or fraudulent:

• Fraud prevented: Prevented fraudulent transactions worth over ₹13,000 crores on Google Pay and displayed 41 million warnings to safeguard Indian users.
• Scammy / ‘get rich quick’ content: In Q3 2024, YouTube removed over 4.1 million channels and 85 thousand videos globally for violating our spam, deceptive practices, & scams policies.
• Tackling clickbait: To further protect our community, YouTube strengthened efforts to tackle egregious clickbait, particularly for videos on sensitive topics like news and current events, ensuring viewers aren’t misled about what they watch on YouTube.
• Engagement-based digital literacy: We're also exploring engagement-based approaches to digital literacy, such as game-based learning. We recently conducted a pilot study of a mobile game – ShieldUp! – designed to prevent users falling for common manipulation techniques used by scammer India. The results showed that playing ShieldUp! increased the user's ability to identify scams, and the effect was stable even 21 days after the intervention. We believe this type of game-based learning can be a powerful tool in building a safer online experience for everyone. More about ShieldUp! here

Cross-industry collaborations

Under DigiKavach, we've partnered with the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre, and onboarded Google Pay, on to the National Cybercrime Reporting Portal. This allows us to receive and share critical information to investigate fraudulent financial activities and ensure that with each identified threat, the entire ecosystem becomes capable of mitigating it.

To build further on ensuring cross-industry cooperation and collective response, Google is also joining the Safer Internet India Coalition. The coalition comprises digital services, telecom and internet providers, banks, fintech players, and other organizations specializing in online trust and safety. The coalition aims to promote user welfare, trust, and safety in the Indian digital space.

Widening the footprint through ecosystem partners

In addition to our own surfaces, we are also working with ecosystem partners to expand the footprint of media literacy and awareness. Google’s philanthropic arm, Google.org has provided grant support to two nonprofits CyberPeace Foundation, which has equipped over 197,000 individuals with fact-checking and responsible online behavior skills, and The Asia Foundation, which is working with local implementing partners, Foundation for MSME Clusters and CUTS International to equip 45,000 MSMEs with the tools and knowledge to combat cyber threats.

Our ongoing commitment to user safety

Preventing user harm from malicious scams requires effective cooperation across the online ecosystem. Bad actors are constantly evolving their tactics and techniques. And we’re sharpening our detection and enforcement techniques to meet these threats head on. We are enhancing our proactive capabilities, ensuring robust and fair policies are in place, and developing innovative tools to combat the misuse of AI. For example, we've introduced SynthID that embeds a digital metadata tag directly into images, video, audio, and text to identify if they were created or altered using AI tools. And, on YouTube, we require creators to disclose when they’ve created realistic altered or synthetic content, and will display a label that indicates for people when they’re watching this content.

We are committed to keeping users and the ecosystem informed and updated on the latest trends and techniques. You can help us in this effort by reporting scams on our platforms. Google is dedicated to working hand-in-hand with the Indian government, industry partners, and civil society to build a truly Digital India – one that is safe, secure, and empowers every citizen to thrive online.