After a few years of expanding privacy and security tools, the Android team is in refinement mode. Then again, when an operating system runs on more than 3 billion devices, little changes can have a big impact. And a slew of new features in Android 12 not only give you more insight into what your apps are up to, they also offer more granular options for how to limit what data those apps can access.
Android 12 is already available in beta and will formally launch in a few months. At Google's IO developer conference today, though, the company is showcasing little tweaks and bigger features that help you understand what goes on behind the scenes—and provide more opportunities to catch unwanted behavior from apps. Some of these additions are similar to features already available in Apple's iOS. But others move the privacy ball forward in new ways.
“With this release we want to keep narrowing down the scope of what data apps get," says Android group product manager Charmaine D'Silva. "It’s taken some time to get it right, but the main focus of this release is giving a deeper level of transparency to users.”
Android 12 includes a “Privacy Dashboard” where you can see which apps used potentially sensitive permissions in the past 24 hours. The dashboard breaks down app activity by category— like “Location,” “Camera,” and “Microphone”—and then shows you which apps accessed those mechanisms. Google will also be asking developers to provide additional information on what they were using the access for at that particular moment. And you can adjust or revoke app permissions through the dashboard. It gives more ins ..
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