Google claims that privacy is a priority, and perhaps it is, but we can’t deny there’s an essential conflict of interest between protecting your privacy and Google being an advertising company.
Recent events in this space include Google’s new Ad Topics framework, which purports to offer users more control. I feel it’s an improvement over cookies, but having my device participate in tracking me is backwards. After all, my device should be protecting my privacy first, not implementing features to track my behavior.
Data “nutrition labels” in the Play Store are a step forward by encouraging proactively a discussion about how user data is processed and used. On the other hand, recent attempts at DRM for the web in Chrome remind us that the main vendor behind Android doesn’t always have user interests at heart.
Is Android doing enough to keep your data safe? If not, what steps could reasonably improve the situation?
In sharing your opinion, please take care to distinguish between Google the company and Android the product. While related, given Google may have privacy issues in one line of business doesn’t necessarily define privacy practices on the Android platform. Also, another interesting angle includes what’s best for you versus what’s best for users as a whole. For example, a privacy feature, to be successful, needs to be reasonably understandable by most users and offer a net benefit without complicating the platform for casual users.
Protect against whom?
Google is intent on enforcing their privacy standards on all advertisers and trackers. Google’s tracking is actually not that bad compared to the borderline malware that some trackers use. That’s why Google removes more and more identifiers with every Android release, forcing everyone to use the generated tracking ID that the user can freely reset or remove all together.
Ad Topics is the next step: no more need to track behaviour across platforms, the data advertisers want to sell is available already. This is better than the browser history stealing approach trackers use (because it happens locally, under the user’s control), but it’s also built into the OS in a way to serve Google.
If you don’t mind Google, then yes, Android protects your privacy reasonably well, and continues to get better.
If you don’t trust Google (and you probably shouldn’t), then no; your best option for Android phones is a Google-free custom ROM.
It’s pretty clear though that they don’t do all that because they care about privacy, but because they want to be the only real player in datamining town.