WHERE is where the wild things are
A lot of people want to know where you are right now and where you’ve been — they’re not stalkers per se, but rather, advertisers looking to promote businesses that are relevant to you. You’ll find these ads all over the internet including on Android apps. While you’ve always had ways of tracking which apps are using your data for what purposes, Android 14 is on track to introduce yet another way to keep you informed of any changes in apps’ data-sharing policies.
Mishaal Rahman, writing for XDA-Developers, has picked up on a new set of data privacy interfaces in Android 14 Developer Preview 1 that augment users’ awareness of apps that share their location data.
This includes new dialog boxes when you browse an app’s location permission settings or are granting location permissions to an app for the first time. The prompts state that the app has declared it may share your location data with third parties. Tapping the prompt gives you details on why the publisher does so and provides links to your privacy settings for immediate action if you so desire as well as to details from Google on what’s entailed in data sharing.
It won’t have been the first time you’ve known about this behavior as the Google Play Store began including a Data Safety section of various declarations in all app listings last April.
But that’s not all: Google takes things a step further in DP1 by including a new submenu in the Privacy section of the system settings called “Data sharing updates.”
The feature compiles a list of apps that have changed their data sharing policies within the last 30 days, letting you review their reasoning and take action as necessary with a link to the app’s location permissions screen. In addition, your device may pop up a notification if it detects a data sharing policy change in an app — again, opening up the opportunity for action right then and there.
Rahman notes that these data sharing policies are focused mainly on location, but there’d be no reason not to expand it to other vectors as well. The data sharing updates feature is also apparently flagged for use on Android 14 for mobile devices and not on Android Automotive, Wear OS, Android TV, or Google TV.
There’s a lot to the how and why on this feature find, so if you’re curious to learn more, I highly recommend reading up on Rahman’s piece. Otherwise, it seems as though Google’s working hard to make up for its own shady behaviors around location data.
