Google on Thursday announced that it is rolling out Protected Computing – a growing toolkit of technologies that transform how, when, and where data is processed to ensure the privacy and safety of a consumer’s data. With this toolkit, the tech giant has taken a step forward in data privacy and is giving users more control over their data. With the marketers moving towards cookie-less world, Google has introduced privacy tools such as Results about you in Search and My Ad Center.
As per the company, ‘Results about you in Search’ allows users to update removal policies. Users can now easily request the removal of Google Search results containing their contact details — such as phone numbers, home addresses, and email addresses. This feature will be available in the coming months in the Google App, and can also be accessed by clicking the three dots next to individual Google Search results. With this, third party data tools such as Mr E, Lusha, and others will now not be able to access a user’s personal data.
Similarly, ‘My Ad Center’ gives control to the users in the case of advertisements one sees. Aimed to be rolled out by the end of the year, this tool will enable users to choose which brands’ ads they want to see more or less of. The tech giant is allowing people to personalise their ads. My Ad Center gives users even more control over the ads they see on YouTube, Search, and their Discover feed, while still being able to block and report ads. Furthermore, the tool will provide users knowledge regarding the information Google uses to show those ads to them.
The company had introduced open-sourced numerous privacy preserving technologies, including federated learning and differential privacy, which were made more widely available earlier this year when they started offering Differential Privacy library in Python as a free open-source tool — reaching almost half of developers worldwide. Through protected computing, Google has rolled out three tools – minimising your data footprint, de-identifying data, restricting access. Via ‘Minimising your data footprint’ the tech giant is leveraging techniques like edge processing and ephemerality, to shrink the amount of a user’s personally identifiable data. Through blurring and randomising identifiable signals, to adding statistical noise, ‘De-identifying data’ uses a range of anonymisation techniques to strip a user’s identity from their data. Lastly, through technologies such as end-to-end encryption and secure enclaves, Google claims to make it technically impossible for anyone to access a user’s sensitive data.
