Hyderabad: Living in the digital age where most payments can be made from the mobile phone, customers are signed into apps for life. These apps lack a feature to delete the account, and users have taken to Twitter to complain.
One of the biggest e-commerce app in the country, PayTM, has reportedly provided an option to delete the account via its ‘help’ section but users have complained that it does not work. This raises a question about what happens to the user’s data, which includes banking credentials.
PayTM chief executive officer Vijay Shekar Sharma has clarified that anyone can delete their account from the help section of the app. His tweet read, ‘anyone can choose to close/delete account simply by going in help section’.
The problem isn’t limited to PayTM. Almost no Indian company wants to talk about what it’s doing with your data. Another e-Wallet company, PhonePe, also drew attention for not letting users delete their accounts.
Once this was brought up on Twitter, PhonePe CEO Sameer Nigam explained that the subscriber can delete the bank-linked accounts themselves. The tweet read: ‘This topic is important enough to justify a detailed clarification. So here goes: 1.You can delete your linked bank accounts via the app itself, anytime and permanently. 2. You can also delete your PhonePe wallet permanently via CS (customer support). However, even if you do so, all transaction history is archived by PhonePe for 10 years, by an RBI directive.’
When contacted, spokesperson from PayTM did not respond to the queries. International companies such as Uber, Amazon and others allow customers to delete their accounts, thanks to the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which came into effect recently. The GDPR regulations say that users can access their data, get a copy of it, and delete it if they want.
