Android 12 intends to better protect your personal data

Like Apple with iOS, Google is making Android more virtuous with respect to the protection of personal data. To do this, when it is released at the end of the year, Android 12 will have a switch to block all the data collected and the user's advertising identifier.

In the wake of Google's I / O developer conference, the internet giant has just launched a support page showing users how to turn off personal data tracking by third-party sites and apps. This is one of the first signs of the Internet giant's efforts on the subject. With Android 12, Google intends to go further and Futura had already mentioned the presence of a button dedicated to disabling the sharing of the unique advertising identifier. It is the latter that allows advertising agencies to monitor your daily activities and identify you in order to adapt the advertisements to your centers of interest at the time. It is already possible to limit this collection or reset it, but with Android 12, the user will be able to simply disable it completely. Instead of the advertising identifier, advertisers will get a string of zeros.

However, we should not believe that Google is throwing in the towel on the collection of navigation data. The firm's resources come in large part from its immense advertising network. To ensure data confidentiality but continue to target advertisements, Google has developed its FloC solution. Rather than individualizing data collection, the process consists of grouping users into cohorts based on their areas of interest.

FloC to collect without identifying

Instead of the famous cookies, to continue to allow advertisers to target their ads, Google, via Chrome, intends to create a profile of each user and will communicate to websites only the predefined group to which it can be classified according to its centers of interest. A process that Google is currently testing and which is currently causing the wrath of other web players. This is particularly the case of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) which totally rejects this principle, or Brave or Vivaldi browsers which intend to block this system, for example.

Unlike iOS, for the moment Google is not announcing whether this blocking function will be activated by default on Android 12, nor whether it will be necessary to delve into the various sub-sections of the settings to disable data collection and the advertising identifier. . We will have to wait until the end of 2021 to find out with the deployment of version 12 of the mobile OS.