A few months ago, Apple launched an ordeal to the Big Data industry — with the new privacy option in iOS 14.5, Apple allowed users to prevent their apps from requesting to be tracked outside of them. This feature called App Tracking Transparency requires developers to receive explicit permission from users to access all or part of their information.
It looks like Google would work on a similar feature for Android. As explained by a support page of Google itself, a user can decide if they want to prevent their apps from tracking their activity in other apps to receive personalized advertising. The option will be available later this year, and it will make it more difficult for applications that make use of our advertising ID.
The advertising ID of the users who have decided to activate this option will be deleted the moment you activate it. With it, applications will not be able to track the user beyond the app itself, which will prevent personalized advertising and ID tracking. It’s a feature that clearly limits the ability to collect information to create profiles and produce personalized ads, something Facebook has complained about.
In the case of iOS 14.5, this function allows you to choose if there are certain apps that you do not want to collect that information since a window appears when you open it. Google is going to bet on a different system because they will introduce a switch with which we can stop this monitoring or collection completely.
No pop-ups will be shown for each application individually when we open one on our Android mobile. Nor can this option be managed with each individual app, but we can only deactivate the tracking completely on the phone.
This new function would be launched at the end of this year in an update of the Google Play services. We can access it in the settings of our mobile, in the ‘Google’ section.
This announcement comes shortly after Google’s obligation to Android developers to explain to the user what specific data their applications collect and how they share it. The question now remains about how this will affect the operation of Android applications and developers, and more importantly: what impact will this have on other technology industries.
