Amazon appears to have got around the Indian government’s insistence on storing personal data of Amazon Pay customers on servers located within India by agreeing to share data with the Indian investigative agencies whenever required. The following clause appears on the page where Amazon Pay’s Privacy Policy is given for the benefit of the Indian customers of the digital wallet:
“We may be required to share the aforesaid information with government authorities, regulators and/or agencies for the purposes of verification of identity or for prevention, detection, investigation including cyber incidents, prosecution and punishment of offences. You agree and consent for APIPL (the company that houses the payments business) to disclose your information, if so required under the applicable law”.
Now, this stipulation by itself means no harm to any customer as long as he or she is using Amazon Pay for legitimate transactions and you should have no worry. The understanding is if the agencies were to come across any criminal having transferred funds on the Amazon Pay platform and they have reasonable doubt that the funds or their source is suspect in their eyes, only then will they ask Amazon to share the information with them.
The only issues being flagged by some experts are these; for one, Amazon being a US company operates the same digital wallet in the US as well and the disclosure norms are different there. In the US, while information may be shared with the agencies, Amazon has to inform the public at large how many such requests were received from the agencies and in how many cases the information was supplied to them. It must also disclose the details of questions it refused to answer to the FBI or other agencies on legal grounds.
On the other hand, Amazon has simply passed on the issue to RBI’s insistence on such a stipulation within the digital wallet functioning without which it would not have been issued the licence. At least, this is what Amazon has said in response to a query by an Indian media organization.