Author Archives: Rahul Roy-Chowdhury

Our work to keep you safe and in control of your privacy

Building helpful products starts with keeping you and your information safe online. The data you trust us with provides helpful and personalized experiences for you in Google products, whether it’s letting you know if you’ve been near someone with COVID-19, or simply being able to find an old email with a special family recipe. It’s also why we keep you and your data safe, and provide easy-to-use settings that put you in control. 


Our privacy and security engineers remain focused on building the most advanced protections into the products you use every day. Treating your information responsibly, protecting it with world-class security and keeping you in control are the principles that guide our work. 


Today we’re sharing a look back at how we kept you safe in the last year, and the ways we’re always working to keep you in control of your privacy.

Responsible data practices designed to keep your personal information safe

The COVID-19 pandemic brought unprecedented challenges in 2020, and we helped people stay safe and informed last year. We worked with Apple to launch the Exposure Notifications System to help with contact tracing in a privacy-preserving way. All Exposure Notification matching happens on your device, and the system does not share your identity with other users, Apple, or Google, nor does it collect or use the location from your device. We continue to make this technology available to public health authorities globally, and now more than 50 countries and states have launched Exposure Notification apps in six months, including most recently California. And people are downloading their regional apps: Forty percent of the population in the UK have downloaded the app, and in the United States, 53 percent of Washington, D.C. residents have enabled Exposure Notifications. 

We continue to invest in differential privacy—the world-class anonymization technology used in our products every day—and have made it available to all developers through an open-source version of the differential privacy library. In the last year, we’ve released new versions of the library to make it even easier for developers to use. Our COVID-19 Community Mobility Reports also use differential privacy to help public health officials as they make critical decisions for their communities. As we head into 2021, we’ll continue to invest in these privacy technologies to help keep your personal information private and secure.

World-class security that protects you automatically

Protecting your privacy starts with the world’s most advanced security. Last year we continued  to invest in industry leading security that automatically detects and blocks a wide range of threats to keep people safe online. One example is Safe Browsing, which gives you state-of-the-art protections from phishing, malware and other web-based threats when you use Chrome. And we continue to work on our long-term effort to make the web more private and secure with the Privacy Sandbox initiative and will share more updates soon. Google Workspace regularly adds new security and privacy safeguards to keep our customers and users and their information protected, including for Google Meet that continues to keep your video meetings for work, school or family gatherings safe. And when it comes to keeping your passwords safe, Google’s Password Manager and Security Checkup help by automatically offering to save your passwords and making them more secure, and Sign-in with Google continues to make it easier to securely sign into new apps and sites—now with just one tap.
GIF showing Google’s Password Manager and Security Checkup, including a notification suggesting changing compromised passwords

New, simple ways to control what gets saved and deleted across platforms and devices

As we work to keep your data private and secure, we’re also always working to make it easy for you to manage or delete it. We launched auto-delete controls so you can choose to have Google automatically and continuously delete activity data from your Google Account after 3, 18 or 36 months. Last June we made auto-delete the default when you first turn on your core activity settings, which are Location History, Web & App Activity and YouTube History. We also brought Incognito mode to Google’s most popular apps, including Maps, Search and YouTube, so you can use those products without saving your activity data to your Google Account. Last year Chrome rolled out new controls to help you simply manage your information and we announced Guest mode as a new way to use your Google Assistant on home devices.
The auto-delete options for your data

Easy-to-use Account controls and settings 

In 2020 we continued to invest in easy-to-use privacy and security settings, which are automatically built into every Google Account and Google products. How you use our products and services is a personal choice: When you sign up for Google products and services, we offer you settings that let you choose how to personalize your experience, and control what activity gets saved to your Google Account. And you can change these settings at any time. 


These privacy and security controls are available in your Google Account and the products you use every day across platforms and devices, including on iOS. For example, Your Data in Search, Maps and YouTube helps you easily understand how data makes these apps work for you and quickly access the right controls, directly in the apps. You can also just search for things like “Is my Google Account secure?” and a box only visible to you will show your privacy and security settings so you can easily review or adjust them. Google Pay, which was recently redesigned in the U.S., has strong privacy and security controls built-in that are easy to understand and simple to set up, access and manage.
GIF showing "Your data in Search" and the ability to delete Search activity

As Google’s iOS apps are updated with new features or to fix bugs, you’ll see updates to our app page listings that include the new App Privacy Details. These labels represent the maximum categories of data that could be collected—meaning if you use every available feature and service in the app. The data you provide to Google products delivers helpful services to you, and you can always control your privacy settings by visiting your Google Account or going directly to the Google products you use on iOS.


Keeping you safe online is core to everything we do. And as we make privacy and security advancements in 2021, we’ll continue to advocate for sensible data regulations around the world, including strong, comprehensive federal privacy legislation in the U.S. We look forward to sharing more with you about our ongoing work in the coming weeks and months. Visit our Safety Center to learn more about how our products keep you safe every day.


How we keep you safe online every day

Every year, National Cybersecurity Awareness month reminds us all about the importance of creating safe online experiences. Keeping you safe online means continuously protecting the security and privacy of your information. That’s why protections are automatically built into your Google Account and every Google product: Safe Browsing protects more than 4 billion devices, Gmail blocks more than 100 million phishing attempts every day, and Google Play Protect scans over 100 billion apps every day for malware and other issues.


The safety of our products is driven by three core principles: keeping your information secure, treating it responsibly, and putting you in control. We’re continuously putting these principles into practice, and wanted to share our newest security and privacy protections, which you can learn more about in our completely refreshed Safety Center—the single source for all the ways we keep you safe in the products you use every day, and it’s live today in the U.S. and coming soon globally.

Proactively protecting you with high-visibility security alerts

When your security is at risk, time is of the essence. We work to make it easy for you to act fast if we ever detect a serious risk to your Google Account. Over the years, we’ve developed new ways to notify people about these issues and helped significantly improve their security. In 2015 for example, we started using Android alerts to notify people about critical issues with their Google Accounts, like a suspected hack. Following this change, we saw a 20-fold increase in the number of people that engaged with these new notifications within an hour of receiving them, compared to email.


Soon we’ll be introducing a redesigned critical alert and a new way of delivering it. When we detect a serious Google Account security issue, we’ll automatically display an alert within the Google app you’re using and help you address it—no need to check email or your phone’s alerts. The new alerts are resistant to spoofing, so you can always be sure they're coming from us. We’ll begin a limited roll out in the coming weeks and plan to expand more broadly early next year.
GGL_critical_alerts (2).gif

Easily control your Google Assistant experience with Guest mode

Every day, Google Assistant helps people get things done in their home, whether it’s suggesting a new recipe you might like or reminding you of your next appointment. But there are times you may not want your Assistant interactions saved to your Google Account. That’s why in the coming weeks, we’ll be introducing Guest mode—a new way to use your Google Assistant on home devices. With an easy voice command, you can turn on Guest mode, and your Assistant interactions while in this mode won’t be saved to your account. You can turn off Guest mode at any time to get the full, personalized Google Assistant experience again. In addition, you always have the ability to go back and delete what you said to the Assistant just using your voice, and we’ve added even more answers to common questions about security and privacy that the Assistant will answer instantly. In fact, we answer more than 3 million privacy and security questions per month, globally.

Safety is built into all our products

Privacy and security have been core to everything we do since our earliest days as a company. Our teams work every day to make Google products safe no matter what you’re doing—browsing the web, managing your inbox, or seeing family on Google Meet. Just this week, we announced our work to protect your information with new security and privacy safeguards for Google Workplace and new password protections in Chrome, as well as Chrome’s progress on the Privacy Sandbox, an initiative to fundamentally enhance privacy on the web. To make it easier to control your privacy, you'll soon be able to directly edit your Location History data in Timeline by adding or editing places you’ve visited with just a few taps, and because Search is the starting point for so many questions, starting today we’ll display your personal security and privacy settings when you ask things like “Is my Google Account secure?”
GGL_search_one_box_JS_009 (1).png

We're also continuing to work on building technologies that can be used to further protect your privacy across all of our products. For example, this year in an industry first, as part of Android 11 we’ve combined differential privacy and federated learning to train the models that allow for next word prediction in Google’s keyboard Gboard. Federated learning, a technique invented at Google, allows developers to train AI models and make products smarter—for you and everyone else—without your data ever leaving your device. In Android 11, we’ll now generate Smart Replies, including emoji recommendations, from on-device system intelligence, meaning the data is never shared with Gboard or Google. 

Protecting your online safety requires constant vigilance and innovation. It starts with building the world’s most advanced security infrastructure and pairing it with responsible data practices and privacy tools that put you in control. We’ll continue to advocate for sensible data regulations around the world, including strong, comprehensive federal privacy legislation in the U.S., and make privacy and security advances that keep you safer online.

Data Privacy Day: seven ways we protect your privacy

Keeping you safe online is a top priority at Google, especially for the thousands of Googlers who work on privacy and security around the world. Today on Data Privacy Day, we’re sharing some of the many ways we keep you safe online and across our products—from built-in protections to easy tools that keep you in control of your privacy.

1. Keep your passwords safe

Password Manager in your Google Account helps you remember and securely store strong passwords for all your online accounts. With Password Checkup, one click will tell you if any of your passwords are weak—whether you’ve reused them across multiple sites, or if we've discovered they’ve been compromised in a third-party data breach—and we’ll give you the link to change them.

2. Let Google automatically delete your data

With auto-delete for Location History, Web & App Activity and YouTube History, you can choose to have Google automatically and continuously delete your activity and location history after 3 or 18 months. You can also control what data is saved in your account with easy on/off controls in your Google Account, and even delete your data by date, product and topic.

3. Use your favorite Google apps in Incognito mode

Incognito mode has been one of our most popular privacy controls since it launched with Chrome in 2008, and last year we added it to YouTube and Google Maps. Tap from your profile picture to easily turn it on or off. When you turn on Incognito mode in Maps, your activity—like the places you search or get directions to—won’t be saved to your Google Account. When you turn off Incognito mode, you’ll return to a personalized Google Maps experience with restaurant recommendations, information about your commute, and other features tailored to you.

4. Try hands-free privacy controls with the Google Assistant

You can also manage your privacy settings with help from the Assistant. Just say, “Hey Google, delete everything I said to you last week” to delete Assistant activity from your Google Account, or “Hey Google, that wasn’t for you,” to tell the Assistant to forget what it heard if the Assistant responds to something that wasn’t actually a question or request. And to learn how Google keeps your data private and secure, just ask, “Hey Google, how do you keep my data safe?” 

5. Browse the web safely with Chrome

Safe Browsing in Chrome automatically protects you from malicious ads and warns you before you visit dangerous sites or download suspicious files. If you use Chrome, your password protections are automatically built-in. We’ll warn you if your username and password have been compromised in a known breach as you log into websites.

6. Check in on your privacy settings across your apps and devices

Data Privacy Day is a great time to check in on your privacy and security settings. Take a Privacy Checkup and we’ll walk you through key privacy settings step-by-step. You can do things like choose what data—such as your location and search history—gets saved to your Google Account or control what ads you see. When you’re finished, head over to Security Checkup for personalized recommendations to help protect your data and devices, like managing which third-party apps have access to your account data.

7. Control what ads you see from Google

We do not sell your personal information to anyone and give you transparency, choice and control over how your information is used. If you’re curious about why you’re seeing an ad, you can click on Why this ad for more information. If you no longer find a specific ad relevant, you can choose to block that ad by using the Mute this ad control. And you can always control the kinds of ads you see, or turn off ads personalization any time in yourAd Settings.  

No matter how you use our products, it’s our responsibility to keep your data private and secure. That’s why we work every day to build the best privacy experiences and strongest protections, and we’ll continue our ongoing efforts to make privacy and security simpler for you. 

Source: Google Ads


Data Privacy Day: seven ways we protect your privacy

Keeping you safe online is a top priority at Google, especially for the thousands of Googlers who work on privacy and security around the world. Today on Data Privacy Day, we’re sharing some of the many ways we keep you safe online and across our products—from built-in protections to easy tools that keep you in control of your privacy.

1. Keep your passwords safe

Password Manager in your Google Account helps you remember and securely store strong passwords for all your online accounts. With Password Checkup, one click will tell you if any of your passwords are weak—whether you’ve reused them across multiple sites, or if we've discovered they’ve been compromised in a third-party data breach—and we’ll give you the link to change them.

2. Let Google automatically delete your data

With auto-delete for Location History, Web & App Activity and YouTube History, you can choose to have Google automatically delete your activity and location history every 3 or 18 months. You can also control what data is saved in your account with easy on/off controls in your Google Account, and even delete your data by date, product, and topic.

3. Use your favorite Google apps in Incognito mode

Incognito mode has been one of our most popular privacy controls since it launched with Chrome in 2008, and last year we added it to YouTube and Google Maps. Tap from your profile picture to easily turn it on or off. When you turn on Incognito mode in Maps, your activity—like the places you search or get directions to—won’t be saved to your Google Account. When you turn off Incognito mode, you’ll return to a personalized Google Maps experience with restaurant recommendations, information about your commute, and other features tailored to you.

4. Try hands-free privacy controls with the Google Assistant

You can also manage your privacy settings with help from the Assistant. Just say, “Hey Google, delete everything I said to you last week” to delete Assistant activity from your Google Account, or “Hey Google, that wasn’t for you,” to tell the Assistant to forget what it heard if the Assistant responds to something that wasn’t actually a question or request. And to learn how Google keeps your data private and secure, just ask, “Hey Google, how do you keep my data safe?” 

5. Browse the web safely with Chrome

Safe Browsing in Chrome automatically protects you from malicious ads and warns you before you visit dangerous sites or download suspicious files. If you use Chrome, your password protections are automatically built-in. We’ll warn you if your username and password have been compromised in a known breach as you log into websites.

6. Check in on your privacy settings across your apps and devices

Data Privacy Day is a great time to check in on your privacy and security settings. Take a Privacy Checkup and we’ll walk you through key privacy settings step-by-step. You can do things like choose what data—such as your location and search history—gets saved to your Google Account or control what ads you see. When you’re finished, head over to Security Checkup for personalized recommendations to help protect your data and devices, like managing which third-party apps have access to your account data.

7. Control what ads you see from Google

We do not sell your personal information to anyone and give you transparency, choice and control over how your information is used. If you’re curious about why you’re seeing an ad, you can click on Why this ad for more information. If you no longer find a specific ad relevant, you can choose to block that ad by using the Mute this ad control. And you can always control the kinds of ads you see, or turn off ads personalization any time in yourAd Settings.  

No matter how you use our products, it’s our responsibility to keep your data private and secure. That’s why we work every day to build the best privacy experiences and strongest protections, and we’ll continue our ongoing efforts to make privacy and security simpler for you. 

Putting you in control: our work in privacy this year

Every day, hundreds of people at Google work on building the best privacy protections into our products. In 2019, we made a renewed push around privacy tools, controls and engineering talent, an investment that is already making a difference—nearly 20 million people around the globe visit their Google Account daily, accessing security, privacy and ad settings. As a vice president of product for privacy, I look forward to supporting this work more in my new role leading Google's strategy on building world class privacy tools. Here’s a look at what we did in 2019 in this important area. 

Keeping your data private and secure

We’re committed to ensuring that our products meet user expectations around data sharing and data security. This year, we used findings from Project Strobe—an internal review of how third parties can request access to your Google account and Android device data—to implement new policies across Gmail, Android, Chrome and Drive to better protect your data and give you improved controls over the third parties to whom you grant access. We built Password Checkup, which automatically checks the security of all of your saved passwords, tells you if they’ve been compromised, and offers personalized help. Password Checkup started as a standalone Chrome extension, but it was so useful—downloaded more than a million times—that we built it into your Google Account’s password manager. We also introduced the Titan M security chip in Pixel 3a andPixel 4 to help secure the operating system and your most sensitive on-device data.

Simpler controls in Google products

We've built tools to give you control over your data, easily accessible directly in our various products. This year, we expanded incognito mode across our apps, including Google Maps on Android and iOS, and we launched various auto-delete tools. We also put privacy controls at the forefront of Android settings, and rolled out simple voice commands so you can manage your privacy settings while using the Assistant by saying something like “Hey Google, delete everything I said to you last week.” All these tools make it easier for you to control what information is saved in your Google Account, and for how long.

Investing in privacy engineering

Our significant investment in privacy engineering and research helps improve our own products, as well as everyone’s overall experience online. In May, we opened the Google Security Engineering Center, our engineering privacy hub, where teams are building tools to keep users’ data safe. And for years, our research teams have been building privacy-preserving technologies like federated learning and differential privacy. These technologies provide smart, helpful experiences—like showing you how busy a restaurant is in Maps without identifying the individuals that visited it. In 2019, weopen sourced the differential privacy library that powers some of our core products and introducedTensorflow Privacy, Tensorflow Federated and Private Join and Compute to help other organizations implement these kinds of technologies. And in August, Chrome introduced the Privacy Sandbox and committed to restricting secretive user-tracking efforts such as “fingerprinting,” with the goal of safeguarding user privacy while keeping ad-supported content accessible on the web.

The year ahead in privacy regulation

This is the second year of GDPR in Europe and we invested significantly ahead of its implementation to upgrade our systems and policies, to ensure that we and our partners can comply with its requirements. 


In the U.S., we’ve continued to advocate for strong federal privacy legislation and published a regulatory framework drawn from various privacy frameworks around the world and our own experience. We continue to believe this is the best way to provide safeguards to U.S. users, give businesses clear rules of the road, and avoid a patchwork of conflicting requirements and exemptions. 


Like many businesses, we’ve been working to comply with the requirements of the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), coming into effect on January 1, 2020. The CCPA will require businesses to disclose how they use people’s data, offer opt-outs of data sales, and give individuals rights around accessing and deleting their data. We’re committed to putting its requirements into practice and have invested in our systems to make necessary changes. 


We’ve offered a range of tools for users to access, manage and delete their data like Download your data and Google Account globally for years, so we’re encouraged to see these practices become more widely adopted and codified into law in California. And while we never sell your personal information to anyone, we do let you control how your information is used, including for personalized ads. As we did with GDPR, we’ve made our CCPA data controls and tools available to all users globally, not just in California. Last month, we also introduced Restricted Data Processing, which will allow advertisers, publishers and partners to restrict how data is used on our advertising products, and help them as they work to comply with CCPA. Publisher partners can also easily implement this kind of limited processing for their users globally. Of course, we’ll continue to follow developments around CCPA and ensure we’re taking appropriate steps if new regulatory guidance emerges. 


Rather than just talk about privacy, we’ve spent this year building real tools and protections—they’re already available and used by millions of people. I’m proud of all this, but I also know that our work to build the best privacy protections into the products you use is never done. I look forward to sharing even more with you in the coming months.

The browser for a web worth protecting

The web is an incredible asset. It’s an engine for innovation, a platform for sharing, and a universal gateway to information. When we built Chrome, we wanted to create a way for people to interact with the magic that is the web, without the browser getting in the way. We created a browser that took up minimal space on your screen, made the omnibar so you could quickly search or get directly to a website, and built our pop-up blocker to help you avoid unwanted content. Since then we’ve also added features such as Safe Browsing, pausing autoplay Flash and more—all aimed at protecting your experience of the web.


Your feedback has always played a critical part in the development of Chrome. This feedback has shown that a big source of frustration is annoying ads: video ads that play at full blast or giant pop-ups where you can’t seem to find the exit icon. These ads are designed to be disruptive and often stand in the way of people using their browsers for their intended purpose—connecting them to content and information. It’s clear that annoying ads degrade what we all love about the web. That’s why starting on February 15, Chrome will stop showing all ads on sites that repeatedly display these most disruptive ads after they’ve been flagged. 


To determine which ads not to show, we’re relying on the Better Ads Standards from the the Coalition for Better Ads, an industry group dedicated to improving the experience of the ads we see on the web. It’s important to note that some sites affected by this change may also contain Google ads. To us, your experience on the web is a higher priority than the money that these annoying ads may generate—even for us.


The web is an ecosystem composed of consumers, content producers, hosting providers, advertisers, web designers, and many others. It’s important that we work to maintain a balance—and if left unchecked, disruptive ads have the potential to derail the entire system. We’ve already seen more and more people express their discontent with annoying ads by installing ad blockers, but blocking all ads can hurt sites or advertisers who aren’t doing anything disruptive. By focusing on filtering out disruptive ad experiences, we can help keep the entire ecosystem of the web healthy, and give people a significantly better user experience than they have today.


We believe these changes will not only make Chrome better for you, but also improve the web for everyone. The web is a vital part of our day-to-day. And as new technologies push the web forward, we’ll continue working to build a better, more vibrant ecosystem dedicated to bringing you only the best experiences.

Source: Google Chrome


Chrome on Android: Do more on every phone and network

The web is amazing. You can find the world’s information, stay connected to friends and family, do your shopping, or be entertained all by simply tapping on a link on your phone. But challenges like high data cost and slow, 2G-like connections often prevent our users from getting the most out of the web.

We want to make Chrome a better place for all our users to enjoy the mobile web. Chrome’s new features on Data Saver, downloads, and content discovery were designed to help you do more on the web, no matter what phone or network you may have.

Save more data, even on videos


We launched Data Saver to help you enjoy more content on the web while using less data. With Data Saver enabled, Chrome compresses the images and text you load, saving up to 60% of your data without changing the content you enjoy.

Now, we have brought the same technology to videos, which allows you to save up to 67% of your data when viewing MP4 format videos through Chrome. In India alone, this new technology is already saving 138 TB of data on video in a single week — roughly 14 years of HD video!

Data Saver is also becoming smarter. When you are on a slow connection, Data Saver will automatically optimize HTTP websites to their essentials. These optimized pages save up to 90% of your data, loading 2 times faster!

ChromeOnAndroid_0.png
Less time waiting for pages to load, more data savings, and video support. You will be glad you turned on Data Saver!


A new downloads experience

We are also thinking about how you can keep using Chrome even when you go offline. We built the dinosaur game to keep you smiling even if you have no access to the internet, but we are doing even better.

With Chrome’s new download feature, when you come across a web page, music, picture, or video that you like, you can just tap the download button to save for later. You don’t need to worry about restarting your download if your connection is dropped, even for big video files. When Chrome goes back online, the downloads you’ve started will automatically resume.

ChromeOnAndroid_1.png

To help you get back to all your content, we added a new home for all your downloads, right inside Chrome. Whether it’s the article you saved for later, or that movie trailer for the train ride home, you can access all the content while you are offline.

chromeandroid3.gif
Downloads are now available on Chrome Beta and will be available soon for Chrome users everywhere.


Discover new content personalized for you

With features like Data Saver and downloads, Chrome is a great way to enjoy content on the mobile web. But we also want to make it easier to discover content you really care about.

Now, when you open a new tab in Chrome, you will see suggestions for websites to visit. But starting in the next release, you will be able to easily discover fresh content just for you. Whether it is the latest buzz from the web or getting back to your most recently downloaded pages, you can simply scroll down on the new tab page to discover all your content in one place!


chromeandroid4.gif
These suggestions are also smart — as you use Chrome more, Chrome will learn what type of content you are interested in and suggest fresh content from your favorite sports team or your most visited sites. You’ll always have something interesting ready!

We believe that our focus on data savings, offline capabilities, and content discovery will make Chrome an even better place for you to experience the mobile web. Download the latest version of Chrome to be one of the first to try these features as we roll them out!

Source: Google Chrome


Chrome: 50 releases and counting!

Chrome reached a pretty big milestone this week – its 50th release! We originally launched Chrome to give users a fast, simple and secure browser. That still remains our mission today.  And while there’s still much more to do – especially with the shift to mobile and providing a great experience for people using the mobile web for the first time – we thought we’d take a step back and reflect on our journey so far.  Here at Google, we’re obsessed with stats, so we thought you might enjoy a whirlwind tour of Chrome, by the numbers.


Chrome50thRelease.png

Source: Google Chrome