Google on Friday said it’s bringing an Android 11 feature that
auto-resets permissions granted to apps that haven’t been used in
months, to devices running Android versions 6 and above.
The expansion is expected to go live later this year in December
2021 and enabled on Android phones with Google Play services
running Android 6.0 (API level 23) or higher, which the company
said should cover “billions more devices.” Google officially
released Android 6.0 Marshmallow on October 5, 2015.
With Android 11 that came out last year, the internet giant
introduced a permission auto-reset option that helps improve user
privacy by automatically resetting an app’s permissions to access
sensitive features like storage or camera if the app in question is
left unopened for a few months.
“Some apps and permissions are automatically exempted from
revocation, like active Device Administrator apps used by
enterprises, and permissions fixed by enterprise policy,” Google
noted[1]. While permission
auto-reset will be turned on by default for apps targeting Android
11 (API level 30) or higher, the new feature has to be enabled
manually for apps targeting API levels 23 to 29.
The rollout is slated to be complete by sometime in Q1 2022.
The changes are part of a number of user-facing privacy and
security features that Google has pushed out in recent months. The
Mountain View-based company, in late July, said[2]
it intends to disallow users from signing in to their Google
accounts from Android devices running versions 2.3.7 or lower
starting September 27, 2021.
Earlier this year, Google announced plans to add iOS-style privacy labels[3] to app listings on the
Play Store that highlight the various types of data being collected
and how it’s used, in addition to limiting apps, with the exception
of a few, from accessing the list of installed
apps[4] on Android devices. In
June 2021, Google also moved to strip users’ advertising IDs[5] when opting out of ads
personalization in Android Settings as part of a Google Play
services update.
References
- ^
noted
(android-developers.googleblog.com) - ^
said
(support.google.com) - ^
add
iOS-style privacy labels
(thehackernews.com) - ^
accessing the list of installed
apps (thehackernews.com) - ^
strip
users’ advertising IDs (thehackernews.com)