Google has announced the Verified Calls feature for its Phone app. At a time when many users face the peril of spam callers and are uncertain to receive calls from unknown numbers, this feature will come in handy as it will identify genuine calls. Verified calls will also state if the caller is authenticated by Google and will state the reason for their calls.

Verified calls will show a blue shield icon that features a checkmark, business name, logo, and number. The call reason field will include messages like confirm transaction activity, food delivery, and flight time changes. Google asserted that it does not collect or store any personally identifiable information after verification.

As per Google, this capability materially improves answer rates, similar to Verified SMS that was launched by the company last year. Verified Calls in the Google Phone app will first roll out to the US, Mexico, Brazil, Spain, and India.

Google Phone app will be available on non-Pixel Android devices and comes preloaded on many Android phones. It will be available for download starting later this week on even more Android devices, according to Google. Users can download it from PlayStore in case their smartphone uses a custom dialler.

The feature will mainly tackle phone call frauds. Google cited a 2019 FTC report that found that phone calls were the number one way people reported being contacted by scammers. "While most people said they hung up on those calls, those who lost money reported a median loss of $1,000. Spam and scam calls erode trust in businesses and increase costs to consumers," Google noted.

The verified calls feature is also likely to reduce business costs. This is because businesses attempting to reach out to customers will face fewer rejected calls with the feature in place. While piloting the feature, Google observed that Verified Calls improves the likelihood of someone answering a call.

"For instance, banks calling to alert a customer about a possible fraudulent transaction can increase answer rates by stating the call reason. A food delivery or logistics company can do the same to make sure customers are available to receive their deliveries," Google noted.

Google Verified Calls can receive competition from Truecaller in India which has over 170 million monthly active users in India.

Source: indiatoday

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Lack of update and support from Google has caused development in Wear OS stale. Where wearable devices from Apple and Samsung are doing great, Google’s Wear OS platform has been struggling to compete. To change this scenario, Google has started the procedure of acquaring the US-based fitness company Fitbit.

For this Google’s Senior VP of Devices and Services said “This agreement underscores our belief in how important wearable tech has become, and it’s also an exciting opportunity for Wear OS,” “We’re looking forward to collaborating with Fitbit to bring the best of our smartwatch platforms and health applications together, and enabling our partners to build the next generation of wearables.”

Google and Fitbit made an agreement of acquiring Fitbit for $7.35 per share in cash which comes at a value of approximately $2.1 billion. The transaction is expected to be completed in 2020. Will we soon see Google branded Smartwatch and fitness bands? We will have to wait and see.

Italy’s competition watchdog has launched an investigation into Apple, Google and Dropbox over their cloud storage services.

The competition and market authority said Monday it has opened a total of six investigations into Apple iCloud, Google Drive and Dropbox’s online storage service in response to complaints about unfair commercial practices and violations of the country’s consumer rights directive. In one case, it’s also looking into “vexatious clauses” in a contract.

The regulator said it’s looking into whether the three companies either failed to, or did not adequately, indicate how users’ data would be collected and used for commercial purposes. It is also examining whether Dropbox failed to provide clear and accessible information on how users could get out of contracts or pursue out of court dispute settlements.

Apple, Google, and Dropbox did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The Italian probe follows wider efforts by European Union regulators to clarify the fine print tech companies use in their terms and conditions of service so consumers can better understand how their information is being used. Facebook updated its terms of service last year to clarify how it makes money from user data in response to pressure from European regulators.

source:AP

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Google's John Mueller said on Friday's webmaster hangout that while the current URL parameter tool has been missing data for a while, it is not a sign that Google will deprecate it. In fact, he said when the tool does migrate to the new Search Console, it "will have some really cool stuff coming out."

John would not say more outside of "it'll be pretty cool" and he does not want to pre-announce anything.

He said this at the 11:04 mark when Mihai asked him about what is going on with the missing data in the URL parameter tool. John said the data should be fixed "fairly soon."

Here is the transcript on the data issue part:

The data there has been missing for a really long time but that's not because we want to deprecate it it's just because things are weirdly stuck on our side with kind of the various teams that are involved with creating that data. Internally we use the kind of similar data already, it's not that we don't follow that input at all. It's just the data that we display in Search Console is kind of stuck just before it reaches Search Console.
And my understanding is that that should get resolved fairly soon but I've been hoping that that's fairly soon for a while now. So I've been nudging a little bit more. Hopefully, that'll get better.

Then he hinted at what is to come, without saying more than it would be very cool and useful for very large sites:

With regards to moving to the new Search Console, My understanding is that they do want to kind of keep that functionality and move that to the new tool as well. I expect especially for larger websites we will have some really cool stuff coming out as well over time that. Yeah, it'll be pretty cool. I don't want to pre-announce anything so I'm not going to go into more any details there. But it definitely is something that makes sense to focus on as you mentioned for e-commerce sites with a lot of parameters. You can clean up some things there and make it a little bit easier to crawl and index your site.

We know Google still uses the data from this tool, a lot. And Google did say the URL parameter may change, which is why we have not seen it migrate yet from the old Search Console to the new Search Console.

Source: seroundtable

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