.App: bringing more people online securely

Posted by Ben Fried, VP, CIO, & Chief Domains Enthusiast

Celebrating 100 of our favorite .app websites. See the list here.

A year ago, we launched .app, the first open top-level domain (TLD) with built-in security through HSTS preloading. Since then, hundreds of thousands of people have registered .app domains, and we want to take a moment to celebrate them.

People are making more websites and apps than ever before. A recent survey we conducted with The Harris Poll found that nearly half (48%) of U.S. respondents plan to create a website in the near future. And a lot of people, especially students, are already building on the web. Over a third (34%) of 16-24 year olds who’ve already created a website did so for a class project.

Having a meaningful domain name helps students turn their projects into reality. Take Ludwik Trammer, creator of shrew.app, who said: “The site started as a project for my graduate Educational Technology class at Georgia Tech. Getting the perfect domain gave me the initial push to turn it into the real deal (instead of making a prototype, publishing a scientific paper on it, and forgetting it).”

Helping creators launch their sites securely

With so many new creators, it’s essential that everyone does their part to make the internet safer. That’s why Google Registry designed .app to be secure by default, meaning every website on .app requires a HTTPS connection to ensure a secure connection to the internet.

HTTPS helps keep you and your website visitors safe from bad actors, who may exploit connections that aren’t secure by:

  • intercepting or altering the site’s content
  • misdirecting traffic
  • spying on open Wi-Fi networks
  • injecting ad malware or tracking

“As a social application, data protection is paramount. As cyber attacks increase, the security benefits a .app domain brings was a key factor for us. We also believe that a .app domain is significantly more descriptive than a .com domain, meaning users can find us more easily! All in all it was a no brainer for us switching to .app.”

-Daneh Westropp, Founder, pickle.app

There's still work to be done. One out of two people don’t know the difference between HTTP and HTTPS. Many major browsers (like Chrome) warn users in the URL bar when content is "not secure," but there’s every website creator still has a shared responsibility to keep their users safe.

.App is year in, and we’re happy to see so many people using it to build secure websites and connect with the world. You can read more stories from .app owners here and get your own .app name at get.app. If you’re one of the millions of people planning to build a website, we hope you’ll join us in making the internet safer and take the steps to securely launch your website.

.App: bringing more people online securely

A year ago, we launched .app, the first open top-level domain (TLD) with built-in security through HSTS preloading. Since then, hundreds of thousands of people have registered .app domains, and we want to take a moment to celebrate them.  

People are making more websites and apps than ever before. A recent survey we conducted with The Harris Poll found that nearly half (48%) of U.S. respondents plan to create a website in the near future. And a lot of people, especially students, are already building on the web. Over a third (34%) of 16-24 year olds who’ve already created a website did so for a class project. 

Having a meaningful domain name helps students turn their projects into reality. Take Ludwik Trammer, creator of shrew.app, who said: “The site started as a project for my graduate Educational Technology class at Georgia Tech. Getting the perfect domain gave me the initial push to turn it into the real deal (instead of making a prototype, publishing a scientific paper on it, and forgetting it).”

Helping creators launch their sites securely

With so many new creators, it’s essential that everyone does their part to make the internet safer. That’s why Google Registry designed .app to be secure by default, meaning every website on .app requires a HTTPS connection to ensure a secure connection to the internet.

HTTPS helps keep you and your website visitors safe from bad actors, who may exploit connections that aren’t secure by:

  • intercepting or altering the site’s content

  • misdirecting traffic

  • spying on open Wi-Fi networks

  • injecting ad malware or tracking

“As a social application, data protection is paramount. As cyber attacks increase, the security benefits a .app domain brings was a key factor for us. We also believe that a .app domain is significantly more descriptive than a .com domain, meaning us Daneh Westropp
Founder, pickle.app

There's still work to  be done. One out of two people don’t know the difference between HTTP and HTTPS. Many major browsers (like Chrome) warn users in the URL bar when content is "not secure," but there’s every website creator still has a shared responsibility to keep their users safe.

.App is year in, and we’re happy to see so many people using it to build secure websites and connect with the world. You can read more stories from .app owners here and get your own .app name at get.app. If you’re one of the millions of people planning to build a website, we hope you’ll join us in making the internet safer and take the steps to securely launch your website.

Carmen Sandiego is back on Google Earth, gumshoe

This March, we put out the call for super sleuths to help us track down Carmen Sandiego in Google Earth. And we were blown away by the enthusiasm and speed with which people found the reformed VILE operative—who is now an ACME agent—by traveling from city to city around the globe.

You not only solved the caper, but also shared stories and memories of playing the original games, watching the shows (both old and new) and sharing the experience with friends, family and kids.

Today, we’ve teamed up with Carmen Sandiego once again—this time to help her recover Tutankhamun’s Mask. Le Chevre, a master climber and classmate of Carmen Sandiego at VILE Academy, has stolen the priceless artifact. We’re counting on gumshoes everywhere to help Carmen find him and recover the loot.

Trailer

To get your assignment, look for the special edition Pegman icon in Google Earth for Chrome, Android and iOS. Good luck, detectives!

Chrome for Android Update

Hi, everyone! We've just released Chrome 74 (74.0.3729.157) for Android: it'll become available on Google Play over the next few weeks.

This release contains the following features, as well as stability and performance improvements:
  • Translate any web page instantly by selecting Translate from the menu
You can see a full list of the changes in the Git log. If you find a new issue, please let us know by filing a bug.

Krishna Govind
Google Chrome

Privacy Awareness Week 2019

Editor’s note: Privacy Awareness Week is an initiative by the Asia Pacific Privacy Authorities (APPA). It is held annually to promote awareness of privacy and personal data protection issues.

Whether it’s delivering search results you’re looking for or recommending the quickest route home, data can make Google products more helpful to you. We think it’s important that you have the information you need, to make the choices you want, about your data. That’s why we build easy-to-use privacy features and controls into our products.

We made some privacy related announcements last week that we want to highlight during Privacy Awareness Week:

One-tap access to your Google Account from all our major products
A few years ago, we introduced Google Account to provide a comprehensive view of the information you’ve shared and saved with Google, and one place to access your privacy and security settings. Privacy controls should be easy to find and use - today you’ll see your Google Account profile picture appear in the top right corner across products like Gmail, Drive, Contacts and Pay. To quickly access your privacy controls, just tap on your picture and follow the link to your Google Account.

Auto-Delete Options
We’re also introducing automatic deletion options, which will enable Google users to set a time limit for how long they want some data to be saved. They can choose to automatically delete data from their account after 3 or 18 months. These controls are available now for Web & App Activity and they will be launched for Location History in the coming weeks.

Your Data in Maps, the Assistant, and more
Late last year, we launched a new feature called Your Data in Search, which puts privacy and security front and centre in Google Search. We’re now making this feature available in Google Maps and the Assistant, with YouTube coming later this month. This provides quick and easy access to the most relevant privacy controls. Any data older than that will be automatically and continuously deleted from your account.

Incognito mode in Google apps
Incognito is a very popular feature in the Chrome web browser and we are bringing this functionality to additional surfaces this year. It’s available in YouTube and is coming soon to Maps and Search. Tap from your profile picture to easily turn it on or off. While using Incognito, a user’s activity - for example the places they search for or navigated to - won’t be linked to their Google account. When users turn off Incognito mode, their apps and devices will be cleared of this history, enabling them to confidently share screens with friends or family.

Chrome privacy enhancements
We’re also updating Chrome to provide users with improved controls for managing cookies and stepping up our efforts to restrict “fingerprinting,” to ensure that users’ privacy choices are respected. You can read more about these changes here.

Personalised ads
As part of our work to improve privacy in the ads-supported ecosystem, Google will provide better visibility into personalised advertising, and tools for others to do the same. We believe that we can build products and privacy for everyone and we are working to bring a thoughtful and thorough approach to improving user privacy in the ad-supported ecosystem.

Our work on privacy is never done and we will continue to explore new ways for our users to manage their privacy. You can learn more about these updates in our blogpost and check out these 5 things you can do right now to stay safer online.


Posted by Ross Young, Government Relations & Public Policy, Google New Zealand.

Expanding your Shopping ads to additional Google platforms

YouTube and Google Discover power visually rich experiences and play a part of millions of users’ shopping journeys. Soon your Standard Shopping campaigns will be able to reach users who discover and continue their shopping journey on these additional Google platforms.

We’re excited to announce that Shopping ads (both Product Shopping ads and Showcase Shopping ads) in your standard Shopping campaigns will be eligible to appear on YouTube and Google Discover beginning the week of July 15th, 2019. Shopping ads served on YouTube and Google Discover will be reported under the Google Display Network.

In preparation for this change, standard Shopping campaigns that are enabled for Search Network will be automatically enabled for YouTube and Discover, beginning the week of June 17th, 2019. This means that any standard Shopping campaigns that target the Search Network will automatically enabled to target the Content Network. After this process, developers using the Google Ads API or the AdWords API can give users the ability to opt-in/opt-out. They can do this by changing the campaign target network as follows:
  • Google Ads API - Modify the NetworkSettings of the standard Shopping campaign to set target_content_network to true or false.
  • AdWords API - Modify the NetworkSetting of the standard Shopping campaign to set targetContentNetwork to true or false.
Ads with these settings will only be eligible to appear on YouTube and Google Discover from the week of July 15th, 2019. During that week, you may start seeing new metrics as part of your reporting data. Depending on which API you are using you can access the metrics by doing the following: Note: If you would like to upgrade to the Google Ads API from the AdWords API, please see more information our blog.

If you have any questions or need help, please contact us via the forum.
- Ian Ballantyne, on behalf of the Google Ads API Team

Premiering new TV solutions in Display & Video 360

Whether it's their favorite YouTube channel, the latest news or that hot show everyone is talking about, connected TV lets people watch what they want anytime. This creates new opportunities for brands to engage with their audience, while bringing together the reach and familiarity of TV with the precision and measurability of digital video. In the last year, the number of connected TV ad slots available to advertisers using Display & Video 360 has increased 8X, which has helped more advertisers reach their audiences using this channel. In fact, the number of advertisers running connected TV campaigns on Display & Video 360 has increased 137 percent in the past year.

To help marketers build on this success, we’re continuing to invest in new TV capabilities for Display & Video 360. First, we’re implementing privacy-forward standards for connected TV that ensure responsible audience management practices by giving users transparency and choice over their ad settings. Second, we’re launching new linear TV capabilities so you can extend your reach to traditional TV viewers by purchasing ads on national broadcast networks and local TV stations. And finally, to help you deliver consistent TV strategies across delivery methods, we’re creating a consolidated TV workflow to buy connected TV together with linear TV.  

Putting people first with connected TV

In today's environment, privacy is top of mind for users, advertisers, and content providers—and connected TV is no exception. As people gain more control over what content they watch, they also want to be in control of how their data is used to inform the ads they see. It’s critical that the industry adopts user-first practices to help build a sustainable connected TV advertising ecosystem.

This is why we teamed up with the IAB Tech Lab’s OTT Technical Working Group to design shared industry guidelines for creating high-quality and privacy-safe connected TV advertising experiences. These guidelines formalize the Identifier for Advertising (IFA), which allows advertisers to reach audiences and measure their campaigns in a way that gives users more transparency and control than alternatives, such as solutions that use the IP address of a viewer's device.

IFA was designed to protect user privacy. It gives users the ability to choose how their data is used. This means they can reset the ID associated with their data or fully opt out of experiences like interest-based advertising. They can also be assured that their choices will remain unchanged if they move their device to a new location.

Display & Video 360 now supports the IAB Tech Lab guidelines, allowing marketers to manage frequency, measure reach, and begin developing responsible audience segmentation strategies while protecting user privacy. We’re also adding support for these guidelines in our publisher platform, Google Ad Manager.

These guidelines will direct stakeholders down the path of best practices to allow connected TV to grow and evolve as a significant advertising platform. Dennis Buchheim
Senior Vice President and GM, IAB Tech Lab

We’re seeing momentum across the industry with key players adopting the IAB Tech Lab guidelines. TV and device manufacturers like Roku and measurement vendors such as Nielsen are adopting IFA. Nielsen, for example, has built IFA-based audiences into Digital Ad Ratings to bring greater understanding of reach on mobile and connected TV audiences.

Adding linear TV to the picture

Connected TV is growing quickly, but traditional linear TV is still an important way people watch. There are some moments, such as sporting events or the big season finale, that just have to be enjoyed live. And many of us still tune in to watch programs from our favorite ABC, NBC, CBS and FOX local network stations. To help you reach people in those moments and on those channels, Display & Video 360 provides access to buy ad slots on national broadcast and cable networks and thousands of local TV stations. Today, U.S. network affiliates are accessible through a beta integration with WideOrbit. And soon, premium national broadcast and cable channels will be available through our partnership with clypd.

To help you easily execute these campaigns and give you more control over your linear TV investments, we’re introducing new buying functionality in Display & Video 360. For example, you can now set up detailed campaign parameters such as geography, daypart, program genre or TV network directly. And throughout the campaign, you can quickly manage budget allocation and optimize reach by adjusting these parameters.

Up next: Consolidated TV buying

At many brands, we’re already seeing stronger collaboration between TV and digital media buying teams to deliver better coordinated strategies across linear and connected TV—and in the future we believe this will be the norm. To help with this shift, we’re consolidating both workflows under a single TV insertion order (IO) in Display & Video 360. This new streamlined buying experience will allow brands and agencies to further simplify the execution of their TV buys by providing insights and setups designed specifically for TV campaigns. We’ll start rolling out this new workflow this fall.
Upcoming consolidated TV IO in Display & Video 360

Upcoming consolidated TV IO in Display & Video 360

With Display & Video 360, you can now expand your digital strategy to reach connected TV audiences in a privacy-safe way. You can also connect with viewers as they sink back on the couch and see what’s on network television thanks to self-service linear buying workflows. Stay tuned as we roll out new features and bring on new partners throughout the year.

Stable Channel Update for Desktop

The stable channel has been updated to 74.0.3729.157 for Windows, Mac, and Linux, which will roll out over the coming days/weeks.


Security Fixes and Rewards

Note: Access to bug details and links may be kept restricted until a majority of users are updated with a fix. We will also retain restrictions if the bug exists in a third party library that other projects similarly depend on, but haven’t yet fixed.

This update includes 1 security fix. This time, none were contributed by external researchers. Please see the Chrome Security Page for more information.

We would also like to thank all security researchers that worked with us during the development cycle to prevent security bugs from ever reaching the stable channel.

As usual, our ongoing internal security work was responsible for a wide range of fixes:

  • [963080] Various fixes from internal audits, fuzzing and other initiatives

Many of our security bugs are detected using AddressSanitizer, MemorySanitizer, UndefinedBehaviorSanitizer, Control Flow Integrity, libFuzzer, or AFL.

A list of all changes is available in the log. Interested in switching release channels? Find out how. If you find a new issue, please let us know by filing a bug. The community help forum is also a great place to reach out for help or learn about common issues.


Abdul Syed
Google Chrome

New ML Kit features easily bring Machine Learning to your apps

Posted by Brahim Elbouchikhi, Director of Product Management and Matej Pfajfar, Engineering Director

We launched ML Kit at I/O last year with the mission to simplify Machine Learning for everyone. We couldn’t be happier about the experiences that ML Kit has enabled thousands of developers to create. And more importantly, user engagement with features powered by ML Kit is growing more than 60% per month. Below is a small sample of apps we have been working with.

But there is a lot more. At I/O this year, we are excited to introduce four new features.

The Object Detection and Tracking API lets you identify the prominent object in an image and then track it in real-time. You can pair this API with a cloud solution (e.g. Google Cloud’s Product Search API) to create a real-time visual search experience.

When you pass an image or video stream to the API, it will return the coordinates of the primary object as well as a coarse classification. The API then provides a handle for tracking this object's coordinates over time.

A number of partners have built experiences that are powered by this API already. For example, Adidas built a visual search experience right into their app.

The On-device Translation API allows you to use the same offline models that support Google Translate to provide fast, dynamic translation of text in your app into 58 languages. This API operates entirely on-device so the context of the translated text never leaves the device.

You can use this API to enable users to communicate with others who don't understand their language or translate user-generated content.

To the right, we demonstrate the use of ML Kit’s text recognition, language detection, and translation APIs in one experience.

We also collaborated with the Material Design team to produce a set of design patterns for integrating ML into your apps. We are open sourcing implementations of these patterns and hope that they will further accelerate your adoption of ML Kit and AI more broadly.

Our design patterns for machine learning powered features will be available on the Material.io site.

With AutoML Vision Edge, you can easily create custom image classification models tailored to your needs. For example, you may want your app to be able to identify different types of food, or distinguish between species of animals. Whatever your need, just upload your training data to the Firebase console and you can use Google’s AutoML technology to build a custom TensorFlow Lite model for you to run locally on your user's device. And if you find that collecting training datasets is hard, you can use our open source app which makes the process simpler and more collaborative.

Wrapping up

We are excited by this first year and really hope that our progress will inspire you to get started with Machine Learning. Please head over to g.co/mlkit to learn more or visit Firebase to get started right away.

Find your balance with new Digital Wellbeing tools

Google I/O is always exciting for me. It’s a great moment when we get to tell the world about a wide range of new products and features that can help everyone do more with technology. Because of how intertwined tech is with every aspect of our lives, how we balance its use with our wellbeing has to be front and center. So, as we did last year, we made time to discuss how our users can find a balance by using technology more intentionally (and that might mean using it less).

Last year, we announced our commitment to digital wellbeing, a company-wide effort to help our users balance their technology use in a way that feels right for them. The idea has taken hold. A recent survey we commissioned found that 1 in 3 Americans have taken steps to improve their digital wellbeing in the last year, and more than 80 percent of them said this had a positive impact on their overall sense of wellbeing.

It’s still early, but we’re already seeing that some of our initial Digital Wellbeing features have helped people take control of their tech use. For instance, app timers have helped people stick to their goals over 90 percent of the time, according to our internal data from March of this year, and people who use Wind Down had a 27 percent drop in nightly usage on average.

Android Digital Wellbeing: Tools for balance

Coming to Android Q

We know there’s much more we can be doing, which is why we were excited to announce a number of new tools and features at I/O last week. We’re making several improvements to existing features, such as giving you more visibility into the status of your app timers, and allowing Wind Down to be scheduled by day of the week. And, building on the success of app timers, we’re extending its functionality to Chrome on Android, which will let you to set time limits on specific websites.

Our devices should help support our intentions throughout the day. Whether it’s work, school or family and friends that we want to focus on, our devices shouldn’t get in the way. Notifications are an important part of keeping you informed, but not all of them are urgent enough to divert your attention. Now you can choose to make some notifications ‘Gentle’. Gentle notifications won’t make noise, vibrate or appear on the lock screen but are always available if you want to browse.

And we created Focus mode, which allows you to temporarily pause distracting apps with a single tap from Quick Settings. Finally, because many people want more positive encouragement, we’re adding the ability  to set a screen time goal with helpful nudges to stay on track.

AndroidQ_Focus Mode.gif

New features for families

For parents, screen time is often a unique challenge; in fact, according to a recent study commissioned by Google, 67 percent of parents are concerned about the amount of time their kids spend on devices. People with kids tell us they love that Family Link lets them set daily screen time limits, but we know that nothing about parenting is black and white. We announced last week that Family Link will roll out new features that enable parents to fine-tune these boundaries by setting app-specific time limits and awarding bonus screen time directly from their own device. (We hope this will also help provide a little balance to family dynamics.)

But tools and features are just part of the solution; for families in particular, communication is key. So on wellbeing.google, we now offer tips and advice from experts, including a conversation guide to help parents talk to their kids about technology use.

We believe technology should improve life, not distract from it, so we’ve made a company-wide commitment to prioritize our users’ satisfaction over the amount of time they spend with our products, and our teams are designing with digital wellbeing as a core principle. We’re focused on improving lives—today and in the future—and digital wellbeing is one of the most important ways we’re working to make that happen.