Google recently announced that its Privacy Sandbox initiative is now also being rolled out for Android, in a move comparable to the ad tracking privacy changes made by Apple in 2021.
Roughly in keeping with numbers seen in recent years, the Google Play Store announced that it blocked 1.43 million bad apps and banned 173,000 malicious or policy-violating developer accounts in 2022.
As with Apple's new program, the proposed privacy labels are meant to give end users a quick reference to the range of data that Android apps are asking for.
Google said it would be automatically wiping logs of location history when a variety of healthcare clinics are visited: abortion providers, domestic violence shelters, addiction treatment facilities, fertility clinics and counseling centers among them.
Interest-based advertising is a critical component of Google's revenue. The company has stepped up testing of its FLoC initiative, which it calls a "privacy first" approach to targeted advertising.
Since the start of the Privacy Sandbox project, Google has been strongly pushing to eliminate third party cookies entirely beginning with its Chrome browser. That initiative had seemed to be well underway, but now appears to be over.
Washington is the latest state in which Google has settled a location tracking lawsuit, adding to a list that has cost it a little over half a billion dollars to date. Lawsuits date back to a 2018 probe that found Google apps and services were continuing to track and log data even after users had changed privacy settings.
The privacy lawsuit dates all the way back to 2018, when Google internally discovered that the Google+ API was being abused. The privacy lawsuit has now been settled for $350 million, after a lengthy appeals process played out.
Google says that Chinese SMS phishing campaigns have collectively yielded somewhere between 15 million and 100 million stolen credit cards in the US alone. The case names 25 individuals and believes the hackers produced over 100 different fraudulent websites that made use of Google branding.
The coalition of states claims that settings that ostensibly turned off location tracking did not actually disable it fully, allowing Google to continue collecting user location data through other methods.
