Google Brings Its Age-Assurance Tech To Android Developers Worldwide (techcrunch.com) 44
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Google is expanding its answer to Apple's age-assurance tools with Wednesday's news that it will bring its Play Signal API to users worldwide by the end of 2026. The technology, already available in Brazil, allows Android developers to identify younger users of their apps in order to provide safer, age-appropriate experiences. The expansion will initially bring the API to Australia and Canada by mid-August, before rolling out globally to all markets by the end of the year.
[...] Like Apple, Google's technology allows developers to obtain a user's age range without needing to access personal information, like their date of birth. Instead, it enables parents to share their child's age range directly with apps. It also lets adults share their age when prompted by app developers as well, allowing for customized experiences. Parents won't have to manage sharing this information on an app-by-app basis, either. To make it easier, Google centralizes these controls inside its parental controls dashboard, Family Link. Once entered, any developer that chooses to incorporate age-range information can access this signal to customize their apps accordingly.
Google notes, however, that the age ranges are not shared by default -- parents must opt in by entering that information. The feature joins other safety tools on Google Play, including those that let developers restrict a child's ability to discover their apps. Parents, meanwhile, can continue to use Google Play's Family Link app to manage their child's screen-time limits, approve app downloads, or set PIN-based content filters for specific apps.
[...] Like Apple, Google's technology allows developers to obtain a user's age range without needing to access personal information, like their date of birth. Instead, it enables parents to share their child's age range directly with apps. It also lets adults share their age when prompted by app developers as well, allowing for customized experiences. Parents won't have to manage sharing this information on an app-by-app basis, either. To make it easier, Google centralizes these controls inside its parental controls dashboard, Family Link. Once entered, any developer that chooses to incorporate age-range information can access this signal to customize their apps accordingly.
Google notes, however, that the age ranges are not shared by default -- parents must opt in by entering that information. The feature joins other safety tools on Google Play, including those that let developers restrict a child's ability to discover their apps. Parents, meanwhile, can continue to use Google Play's Family Link app to manage their child's screen-time limits, approve app downloads, or set PIN-based content filters for specific apps.
A Brave New World (Score:5, Insightful)
Soon to be followed by political beliefs, religious beliefs, criminal record, income, credit score, social credit score, etc.
Nothing could possibly go wrong.
Re:A Brave New World (Score:4, Insightful)
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Seems highly unlikely, when such actions are obvious even to the general public.
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"Do you blame the 19-year old airman working the military ID desk"
If you're working for an organization that's engaging in immoral, unjustified and/or illegal activities, and you're not already on your way out the door, then you're part of the problem.
Regardless of whether the organization is governmental or solely commercial. Or both.
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every accusation is an admission of guilt: "This is what I would do, so they MUST be doing it"
Nope. Sometimes its an objective observation. And what they are doing has always been contrary to the writer’s belief.
Re: A Brave New World (Score:2)
Of course they don't. They actually usually don't have a say in the matter at all. Ideas like these come from the world-detached executive level. All the middle management hear is "I don't care. Just get it done."
Google Social Credit (Score:3)
Google "Social Credit"
A complete social credit score on each google user.
Factors:
Smoked weed in a state where it's illegal?
Got arrested?
Got convicted for reckless driving or driving under the influence.
Behind on a few loan payments?
Got fired for cause?
Filed too many lawsuits against employers or corporations?
On a terrorist or no-fly list?
Complained to a representative of congress which is a party you despise and pissed them off?
Went to a protest, detained, but released?
Complained to your employer about thei
Reputation for knowledge or manipulation (Score:2)
Pretty sure that was some kind of parody of the Chinese system, but the objectives matter. If your objective is to control people, then the focus should be simple. You want them to understand exactly what you want them to do. Actually it's another kind of dimensional collapse, where the key dimension is obedience.
If the goal is to increase freedom, then knowing more and considering more dimensions matters. Age is an important dimension, but collapsing decisions to that dimension creates new problems. There
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Yes it was a parody, but a frightening one.
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Thanks for clarifying.
Probably not worth attempting to clarify my position, but...
I think freedom is closely tied to incomplete knowledge. That even includes knowledge of myself and how I can be manipulated to reduce my freedom. I therefore continue to advocate for MEPR (Multidimensional Earned Public Reputation) as a tool that could simultaneously hold me accountable for my public behaviors while helping me improve--if I want to. How I behave in public would be reflected in how people might expect me to be
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Google "Social Credit"
A complete social credit score on each google user.
Factors:
Smoked weed in a state where it's illegal? Got arrested? Got convicted for reckless driving or driving under the influence. Behind on a few loan payments? Got fired for cause? Filed too many lawsuits against employers or corporations? On a terrorist or no-fly list? Complained to a representative of congress which is a party you despise and pissed them off? Went to a protest, detained, but released? Complained to your employer about their shitty policies?
No way Google would do that. The potential liability for making mistakes would be enough to make them run screaming all by itself, even assuming there's no risk if the information is accurate -- which is at least not clear and probably not true for many of the things you listed.
Google is leery of even having such information, and definitely isn't going to be giving it out to anyone who doesn't show up with a subpoena or a warrant.
Re:Google Social Credit (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm not so sure.
The US government relies more and more on corporations to verify things, conduct extra-judicial searches, and to make sure that the citizenry is doing the "right things".
A lot of the due diligence the US government used to do in-house is now outsourced to large corporations. For example: Flock Safety, and Palantir.
The rights granted under US constitution are being systematically eroded by these private entities.
If google were to successfully lobby the Federal Government for a liability exclusion statute and changes to the Fair Credit Reporting Act, then a social credit system could come to pass.
Re: Google Social Credit (Score:2)
Don't really need any changes to FCRA because it already doesn't protect us from abuses like your credit score being used to determine if you will be employed. It's already designed to screw us. Furthermore the biggest players love it that it's not cheap and convenient to use for everything, they want the advantage
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The US government relies more and more on corporations to verify things, conduct extra-judicial searches, and to make sure that the citizenry is doing the "right things".
Google refuses all of that. Basically all of the tech companies do.
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Google is leery of even having such information, and definitely isn't going to be giving it out to anyone who doesn't show up with a subpoena or a warrant.
Have you not noticed Google's business model is pretty much based on gathering data they shouldn't have, then handing it out to the highest bidder? Something tells me they aren't too worried about accuracy so long as it doesn't have a negative impact on their executives or their bonuses.
The Irony and the Hypocrisy. (Score:3)
At least we know why Google HR doesn't dare run that list internally.
The output would be quite the novel titled The Irony and the Hypocrisy.
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Soon to be followed by political beliefs, religious beliefs, criminal record, income, credit score, social credit score, etc.
Nothing could possibly go wrong.
Slippery slope fallacy [wikipedia.org]. Given that this is strictly opt-in, for children only, under parental control, there's absolutely no reason to think that any of the rest of that is soon to follow.
Re:A Brave New World (Score:5, Insightful)
Given that this is strictly opt-in, for children only, under parental control, there's absolutely no reason to think that any of the rest of that is soon to follow.
Yes, there are absolutely reasons to expect that. The main one is that it's Google. Google has a long history of promising great privacy measures and policies for some new product and later, after capturing many customers, going back on their word and revoking or changing the policies - and from what I've seen, always in the sense of less privacy.
Here are some examples:
- combining user data over multiple services. For years, search, GMail, YouTube and other products had separate privacy policies, which meant data collected by one service will be siloed to that service. However, after capturing a big enough market share Google announced they're switching to a single Google-wide privacy policy and combining all the user data from the different services. Google was widely criticized by privacy advocates and got investigated by EU regulators.
- using GMail contacts for GBuzz connections. This was an abuse of the user's data: the customers created contacts for a specific purpose, and Google took them and used them for something completely different and unexpected (and with no opt-in either). This led to such a backlash that Google had to backpedal. Fortunately GBuzz died quickly, but if it hadn't, I'm sure Google would have tried the same thing again later.
- location history: the expectation was that turning off Location Services would stop Google from collecting location data and sending it to advertisers and others. However investigators discovered it was not the case.
- when Google acquired DoubleClick they made assurances that advertising data will not be combined with personally identifiable information. This was reversed when Google changed policies to allow this data mingling.
In other words, Google can not be trusted to abide by their word. Even if they publish good privacy policies, and even if they respect them for some time, all of their policies have wordage reserving the right to modify the policies in the future. Historically, they often do change those policies, to the detriment of customers. Buying into Google's promises is a fool's game.
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Soon to be followed by political beliefs, religious beliefs, criminal record, income, credit score, social credit score, etc.
Nothing could possibly go wrong.
In fact it would be great if you could control all that information and provide it to apps and websites on a need-to-know basis. Provided its really under your control rather than handing it to the largest advertising company in the world who can thus prof with your data by choosing with whom and when to share it.
Unfortunately developers seem uninterested in the open, distributed protocols that exist to provide this same feature, so it will be adopted by the masses only when big platforms include them in th
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Soon to be followed by political beliefs, religious beliefs, criminal record, income, credit score, social credit score, etc.
Nothing could possibly go wrong.
In fact it would be great if you could control all that information and provide it to apps and websites on a need-to-know basis. Provided its really under your control ....
The Solid project [wikipedia.org], created by Sir Tim Berners-Lee [wikipedia.org], and the organization Inrupt [inrupt.com], the "commercial venture" created to implement Solid, are intended for exactly that purpose.
Computer security expert Bruce Schneier announced in 2020 [schneier.com] that he had joined the company, which seems to be developing rather slowly since then.
The tag line on the front page of Inrupt's Web site now says, "AI That Actually Knows Your Customers", which sounds like more of the same (in my view), not privacy-enhanced disruption at all. On
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Not in Europe. It's a bit complicated because there may be things like news articles that are public, but generally speaking there isn't some website or database where anyone can go look up what criminal convictions someone else has.
There is also a time limit on many of them, after which they don't have to be reported to your employer or insurance company, for example.
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I stopped running GApps years ago. Most normal people would never wipe their phone and delete their major social networks. I admit it's hard to do, but it's a lot better on this side. I know my mobile provider still sells my location data, but at least I'm not sending any to Google and that's a big chunk out.
I wish we could educate people on how to reduce tracking,
Cops already do that (Score:1)
It's a private db so nobody cares.
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Age-appropriate Addiction. (Score:2)
The technology..allows Android developers to identify younger users of their apps in order to provide safer, age-appropriate experiences.
And when the problem society is addressing is addiction, what exactly is the age-appropriate response?
Shocking how Greed seems to want society to forget the root fucking problem here..
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Interesting way to describe the problem. However I think you are overlaying a couple of aspects here. I don't think age is the key factor in addictive or obsessive behaviors. My current thinking is that most people tend to behave like addicts. Some of the addictions are much more harmful, such as gambling, or even include physical aspects, such as alcohol. There is a dimension of "ease of addiction" in that some people are more likely to become addicted or behave obsessively, but my theory is that the easil
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*sigh*
Annoying numeric agreement problem. Thinking "economic systems" but got diverted by the specific example...
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You are right to be skeptical. These "tools" are not for your benefit; they are to allow Google to improve its tracking data so they can sell better ads or train their AIs.
But Google said she was 18! (Score:1)
The Age Assurance I want... (Score:4, Insightful)
...is the legal framework that I can hand my logins and all digital accounts to my heirs and assigns upon my death.
I'm going to provide them all the passwords etc regardless but I'd very much like the legal framework to recognize this.
Honestly my biggest challenge is keeping track of all the logins and remembering to update "that document" when I make changes. It's another reason I refuse to (only) use biometric unlocks on devices. There are plenty of use cases I can imagine where I might need someone to unlock something and I'm not present.
Lockdown (Score:4, Insightful)
Preventing the bypass of age restrictions will be a great new excuse for preventing you to do what you want with your own device.
Re: Lockdown (Score:2)
I think you're right.
That tech is garbage (Score:2)
It told me that I was a minor. I wasn't a minor when Slashdot first hit the web.
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Google's Age Assurance tech is garbage. (Score:2)
After not agreeing to send my government ID to Google, Google spent 2 days and determined that I'm not yet 18 years old... Considering that I was alive to see the first human moon landing, that is funny.