Google is improving the privacy of the Android mobile operating system | technology

One of the biggest criticisms usually leveled at the world’s most widely used Android mobile operating system (present in 84% of devices sold in 2020, according to IDC consultancy), is its lack of privacy compared to others. Apple, for example, Last year introduced an important amendment: Users can choose whether or not they want the apps they install on their phones to track them. Google is trying to reverse the situation. As the company announced today, it is working on a new privacy environment that improves user protection while continuing to make targeted or personalized advertising possible.

The action package, dubbed Privacy Sandbox for Android, aims to expand the safeguards system Submitted less than a month ago to the web. It was released separately because Chrome (web browser) and Android (mobile operating system) are based on different technologies. “It will be built, in fact, on the progress and lessons we gain in the effort dedicated to protecting the web,” Anthony Chavez, Vice President of Product Management for Android, said yesterday at a press briefing with European journalists Share. This newspaper. As the company explained, the package of actions targeting Android will limit access to user data with third parties and will work without inter-app identifiers, including advertising identifiers, which will nonetheless continue for at least another two years. This is not an easy problem to solve. It’s really very complicated and it will take time,” Chavez admitted.

The above identifiers are unique identifiers that are generated for each device, and are a kind of license plate to which the rest of the data collected about its owner is associated. Your search history, purchases made, times of the day you are most active, favorite games or interactions with friends are just part of what is reflected there. The cyber organization headed by Max Schrams, Austrian lawyer that made the big tech companies keep the data of the Europeans in the community area, I filed a lawsuit against Google and Apple last year To use these tracking identifiers without warning users.

Google is also exploring the inclusion of measures to enhance privacy technologies that reduce the possibility of Secret data collection. Here it refers to so-called device or browser fingerprinting, a completely opaque user procedure by which unique identifiers are generated for people based on, for example, how long the browser takes to open a pdf file or the types of information requests the browser sends to the server. These processes happen outside the platform, in this case Android. Google has yet to say how it will combat these intrusions.

The company has now been given a year to develop this new protective environment, the development of which has called on the industry to develop. According to its own predictions, the new privacy environment should be ready for testing (beta phase) by the end of the year and will be finally launched in 2023.

Initialization of the ‘post-cookie’ phase

Google’s announcement comes just a month after the company itself revealed major changes to its strategy for extracting information from users. The Mountain View giant decided that its Chrome browser, which has a 66% market share, is the most widely used browser in the world, will be left aside biscuit A third party in 2023. the biscuit They are the cookies that we collect on our devices when we surf the Internet and that are subsequently collected by companies to obtain data about Internet users.

Google’s idea is that as of 2023 only the five major topics on websites that an Internet user visited in the past week are logged through the Chrome browser. These attributes will be visible to the user, who will be able to delete them. Or what is the same: you will be given the option to decide not to participate in the tracking system.

They indicated from the company that this model will also be implemented in the Android environment, although it will be supplemented by other procedures that are still under development.

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