One of the great criticisms that is usually made of the Android mobile operating system, the most used in the world (present in 84% of devices sold in 2020, according to the IDC consultancy), is its lack of privacy compared to others. Apple’s, for example, introduced an important modification last year: users can choose whether they want the applications they install on their phone to track them or not. Google seeks to reverse the situation. As the company announced today, it is working on a new privacy environment that improves user protection while still making targeted or personalized advertising possible.
The package of measures, baptized as Privacy Sandbox for Android, aims to extend the system of guarantees that was presented less than a month ago for the web. It is released separately because Chrome (web browser) and Android (mobile operating system) rely on different technologies. “It will be built, in fact, on the progress and lessons that we obtain in the efforts dedicated to the protection of the web,” said Anthony Chavez, vice president of product management for Android, yesterday in a briefing with European journalists in which he participated. this newspaper. As explained by the company, the package of measures aimed at Android will limit access to user data with third parties and will operate without identifiers between applications, including advertising IDs, which will nevertheless survive at least two more years. “This is not an easy problem to solve. It is in fact extremely complex and it will take time”, confessed Chavez.
The aforementioned IDs are unique identifiers that are generated for each device, a kind of license plate to which the rest of the data collected about its owner is associated. Search history, purchases made, times of the day with the greatest activity, favorite games or interactions with friends is only part of what is reflected there. The organization of cyberactivists led by Max Schrems, the Austrian lawyer who got big technology companies to keep Europeans’ data on EU territory, sued Google and Apple last year for using these tracking identifiers without warning users. .
Google is also exploring the inclusion of privacy enforcement measures, technologies that reduce the possibility of covert data collection. It refers here to the tracking of the so-called fingerprint of the device or the browser, a totally opaque procedure for the user by which unique identifiers of people are generated based on, for example, how long it takes a browser to open a pdf file or what types of information requests the browser makes to the server. These processes happen beyond the platform, in this case Android. Google has not yet said how it will combat these intrusions.
The company is now given a year to develop this new protection environment, whose development it has invited the industry to develop. According to its own forecasts, the new privacy environment should be ready for testing (beta phase) by the end of the year and will be definitively launched in 2023.
Setting the stage ‘post-cookies’
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 has decided that its Chrome browser, which with a market share of 66% is the most used in the world, will leave aside the cookies third party in 2023. The cookies They are the tracking files that we accumulate on our devices when we browse the Internet and that are later collected by companies to obtain data about Internet users.
Google’s idea is that from 2023 only the five main topics present on the websites that the Internet user has visited in the last week through the Chrome browser are recorded. These themes 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.
This model will also be applied in the Android environment, they point out from the company, although it will be complemented by other measures that are still under development.
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