CurrentC was designed to collect all your transaction info so that its owners could analyze your buying habits. I’m delighted that not-CurrentC won that war.
(I personally use Apple Pay, but my understanding is that Google Pay has the same privacy advantages for end users. Both of them are light years ahead of the other boondoggle.)
As far as I know, the current Google Pay is identical to Apple Pay: it’s just EMV tap-to-pay. So it would be the same protections. Samsung pay too.
It was kind of neat that Samsung had that thing for a short while that would somehow trick the magstripe reader in a POS terminal by blasting magnetic fields at it to think that you had swiped your card.
I think there was a different one before that that was not, but I’m also pretty sure that’s long gone. And I think it was more like Apple Pay on the web, where it was really for paying in a non-card environment. But I’m not an android person, so I’m not sure.