Google Is Finally Copying Apple’s Approach to Privacy
Few companies are as enthusiastic about analyzing your data as Google. Yet the data giant also wants you to know it cares about your privacy. How can it reconcile these contradictory stances? By taking a page out of Apple’s playbook.
If you were watching Google’s I/O keynote this week, you heard one phrase repeated over and over: “on your device.” This easily overlooked phrase marks a subtle but important shift in philosophy for a company that’s spent years collecting massive troves of user data. Instead of sending every bit of information about you to a far-off server farm, Google is following Apple’s example of analyzing data on your phone, supposedly without ever sharing it with the company.
This comes at a time when the search giant is trying to change its image as an invasive, rather than helpful, steward of your data. In an editorial for the New York Times — published the same day I/O kicked off — Google CEO Sundar Pichai said that “privacy cannot be a luxury good.” An apparent snipe at Apple, even as his company uses some of the same models and features for protecting your privacy that Apple employs.
That’s not to say that Google will stop gobbling up your personal data altogether, but it wants to do so in a way that’s less invasive. Not for nothing, keeping that data out of Google’s hands may also help the company avoid repeats of the $57 million fine it received under Europe’s new GDPR law.
Android’s default keyboard is a prime example. Google explained during its keynote that it uses a machine learning process called Federated Learning to analyze your typing patterns directly on your phone. If the company were to do this kind of analysis in the cloud, it would require uploading everything you type onto Google’s servers, which would be a massive privacy risk. Instead, the keyboard only uploads the results of your phone’s analysis, and then combines that analysis with everyone else’s. Then it distributes what it learned from everyone back to all the phones that use the app.
The process is extremely technical — you can read more about it here — but the result is that your phone’s keyboard can learn that the sentence “Let’s yeet this…” should end with “wheat” even if you’ve never typed those words in that order before. Those new predictions come from other people’s phones, all without ever uploading what anyone actually typed to Google’s servers.
If that approach sounds familiar, it’s because Apple made a similarly big deal about it a couple years ago when it launched the iPhone X. While other companies snatch up your data, the promise went, Apple will give you that same A.I. power while protecting user data. Incidentally, Google has been using Federated Learning since 2017 as well, though the company is well-known for analyzing large amounts of user data in the cloud as well.
According to Professor Jon Festinger of the Centre for Digital Media — a joint graduate institute between several Canadian universities specializing in new media — this is a step in the right direction. “These are very positive steps, stepping away from the cloud,” he says. “That precedent of being on device, that’s fantastic.”
Google is also implementing more Apple-like privacy controls that users can see. For example, the next version of Android will give users the ability to only let an app use their location a single time, instead of giving it permission forever just because you wanted to order a pizza. iPhone users have had this for a couple years, but Google’s just now getting around to it. With Android updates as notoriously slow as they are, it may still be a few more years until most users have this option.
Of course, Google won’t kick the big data habit just yet, but it is giving users more control over the data they do collect. The company is rolling out the familiar Incognito Mode from Chrome to more apps, including Maps, YouTube, and Search. You can also set your Web & App Activity history — which includes things like the sites you visit or the things you search for — to auto-delete when it’s anywhere from three to 18 months old. Later, Google will roll out a similar feature for your location history.
While this is a good feature to have, Jennifer King, director of consumer privacy at Stanford’s Center for Internet and Society, says it might not mean much if consumers never figure out they can delete their data in the first place. “Some of this stuff is really complicated for consumers,” she explains. “The skeptic in me would always say… Why isn’t the location history deletion feature set to 18 months by default?”
King was speaking hypothetically, since the location history feature is not available yet. However, a similar feature to delete your web activity currently defaults to saving your data forever. If you want to automatically delete older data, you’ll have to dig through your Activity Controls page.
Still, Google clearly wants to earn some trust back. The company announced an A.I. research tool called TCAV to combat bias in machine learning systems by examining how they came to their conclusions. Google used the example of an image recognition system — like the kind used in Google Photos — that’s given pictures of mostly male doctors and inaccurately concludes that it should only identify a picture as a doctor if the subject is male.
In such a situation, though, only a human could teach the machine that being male shouldn’t be a criterion for identifying doctors. “I don’t know how you correct for those things without explicitly having humans review and add input for those models,” King says. While TCAV is designed to see how neural networks are thinking in an abstract way without examining raw consumer data, it’s hard to know whether this presents new risks.
“The problem of reverse engineering identity, we don’t know enough about that,” says Festinger. “So we don’t know how susceptible these devices are, and it’d be interesting to hear from Google about it.”
Google did not respond to a request for comment about its new features.
Google Is Finally Copying Apple’s Approach to Privacy
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