Google’s new Privacy features and enhancements (I/O ‘21)

4 min readMay 28, 2021

A few days ago the Google I/O 2021 Keynote was streamed because of the pandemic. But that did Google not stop from announcing A LOT of new AIs, features, OS updates, etc…

In this article I’m only going to focus on privacy features and enhancements.

Google Account

Auto-delete for Google accounts was announced at the Google I/O ’19. It shall automatically remove activity data after a specific time span. Since then Auto-delete has been made the default for all new Google Accounts with a set time span of 18 months.
As an effect more than 2 Billion Accounts now have Auto-delete activated.

Password Manager

To improve security and privacy for your Accounts the Password Manager was updated with the following new features:

tool for importing passwords from other password managers
deeper integration across Chome and Android to have all passwords synced at every time
automatic password alerts for notifying if a stored password was compromised in a third party breach with a possibility to directly change the password of the third party app via the manager

Data used for ads

It’s not a new information but it was again clarified that none of the following personal information are used for improved advertizing:

stored content like in Google Drive, Photos, Gmail
health information
race
religion
sexual orientation

All of these data are completely kept private and encrypted.

Privacy Sandbox

The Privacy Sandbox is an open source sandbox initiative to collaborate with publishers, content creators, advertizers and organizations to develop new privacy preserving solutions.
The Goal of it is to come up with new technologies to make advertizing more private and secure.

Differential Privacy

A relatively new technology Google developed to be able to deliver personalized content and experience with large sets of data while your individual data can never be identified as yours.

To share those technologies all algorithms regarding Differential Privacy are shared in “The world’s largest open-source library of differentially-private algorithms”.

Federated learning

This technology, developed in 2016, now enables machine learning to be trained without the need of raw data leaving your device.
It was made clear that all data used are private, locally and in the cloud.

Android’s Private Compute Core

This is an open source computing core built into Android devices to make features like “Live Caption”, “Now Playing” and “Smart Reply” possible again without sharing any data with Google servers.

Google Apps Incognito Mode

The incognito mode was added to Google Search, Google Maps and YouTube to surf without sharing your identity with Google servers.

Quick deletion of last 15 minutes of search history

To “the most popular apps”, I’m not exactly sure which apps are included, there will be added an option to delete the search history of the last 15 minutes by clicking on your profile picture.

Locked, private folder in Google Photos

There will be a folder added to Google Photos which is locked by password or biometrics to restrict access to specific images.

This feature will come to Google Pixels first and will follow on other Android phones in 2021.

Android Privacy Dashboard

This dashboard is a new overview in Android. It shows the history of granted permissions for every single app, also Google Apps.
The most important permissions are “Location”, “Camera” and “Microphone”. But it seems like you can see the history for some permissions like “Files and media”, “Contacts” and 3 more.

This dashboard can also be used to directly revoke app permissions with a few taps.