Google has announced at The Android Show that it will be significantly beefing up Android’s security, adding new AI-powered ways to keep you safe from all manner of threats and theft.
These new protections will aim to protect you from scam calls pretending to be from banks and financial institutions, adding new features to prevent further loss when a phone is stolen, and even stronger protections for your privacy within apps.
Android will automatically bin banking scam calls
The biggest and most impactful new feature is the ability for Android to automatically dump scam calls that claim to be from a bank or financial institution, adding to Android’s already-robust scam protection.
It’s become depressingly common for scammers to pretend to be calling from a bank by using software to “spoof” a trusted caller ID. They rely on people dropping their guard when they see a familiar name on a caller ID, and on the whole, this strategy seems to work, with scammers robbing people of almost $1 billion dollars a year across the entire world.
Google is partnering with a number of banks and financial companies to guard against these sorts of calls by actively checking with the app in question whether an official call is taking place or not. If a banking app reports that it isn’t calling you, then Android will automatically hang up, ending the threat.
It will also automatically decline calls that a bank has designated as “inbound-only”, meaning no-one should be calling you from that number.
This does require that you have the app for the bank in question installed on your device, so it’s not foolproof protection if you don’t, but it is available on a very wide range of devices. Google has said it’ll be available on devices running Android 11 and newer, and it’ll start rolling out in the coming weeks with support for Revolut, Itaú, and Nubank. Support for other banking apps are expected to follow in the coming year.
More app monitoring, better location controls, and theft controls
Google is also adding new controls to make it harder for thieves to harvest data from your phone if it’s stolen. The Mark as Lost feature in the Find Hub will now have the ability to specify a biometric unlock as well as a pattern or PIN code, and it will also hide Quick Settings options and prevent new WiFi or data connections, making it harder to get around these protections.
These protections will apply on all new Android 17 devices, and will also be added to devices running Android 10 or newer on devices in countries like Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and the UK.
In addition, Google will be adding a new location control in apps that lets the app access your location only when you’re actively using a feature that needs it.
Finally, Google is also adding new dynamic protection to Android’s operating system, which monitors whether apps are acting oddly and may be stealing data. It will then give you the chance to uninstall it to prevent any further issues.
