Applicable from 3 August 2020, Google Inc. has decided to place new restrictions on Android apps that can track your location in the background. The American Multinational Tech company would have a new review process. It will check whether an app needs access to the data or not depending on a set number of factors, before granting approval to them. The changes were announced earlier this week, in a blog post to Android developers.
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Crackdown on Location Tracking The new policies on tracking were announced as part of the upcoming release of Android 11 that lets users grant sensitive permissions on a one-time basis. Google has removed the “Allow all the time” permission from the dialogue box by default. Thus for an app to track background location, a developer would need to ask a user to go through their settings and enable it explicitly. The announcement post also advised developers to verify any third-party SDKs and libraries they use in their apps. A study had revealed last year that many such libraries track users even if they opt-out of location tracking.
Story Behind the Move Krish Vitaldevara, Director of Product Management Trust & Safety at Google Play said in the officially released blog post, “Many of these apps could provide the same user experience by only accessing location when the app is visible to the user. We want to make it easier for users to choose when to share their location and they shouldn’t be asked for a permission that the app doesn’t need.” If a location-tracking feature is found to “deliver clear value” like an app that sends emergency or safety alerts, such as a crime reporting app like Citizen, would have a strong case. Conversely, an e-commerce app with a store locator feature would work just fine by accessing the user’s location only when a search for a nearby store is done.
History of Google’s Approach to Location Tracking Google’s new policies will apply to its own apps, which is reassuring given the company’s failed approaches to handle location tracking in the past. Back in 2018, Associated Press found that turning off the “Location History” setting wouldn’t stop all location tracking because of an additional “Web and App Activity” setting that would continue to track you. Then as a rectifying measure, Google introduced a new feature in 2019 to allow the user to automatically delete this location data after a certain amount of time.
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Google and googol connection– On Sept. 15, 1997, over the BackRub title, Sergey Brin and Larry (Lawrence) Page registered the domain name of their mushrooming project as Google, a twist on “googol,” a mathematical term represented by the numeral one followed by 100 zeros. The name hinted at the seemingly infinite amount of data the brainy pair code their fledgeling search engine to mine, make sense of and deliver. Many wondered if Google is a misspelling of Googol. More Info
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