Скачать или смотреть Google is preparing new privacy tools to give people more control

(8 May 2019) LEAD IN:
Google announces updates for its artificially intelligent voice assistant and new privacy tools to give people more control over how they're being tracked on the go or in their own home.
Amid growing customer concerns over constant location tracking, the company will allow users to cloak their identities to prevent their locations from being recorded.

STORY-LINE:  
CEO Sundar Pichai kicked off the company's annual developer conference (May 7), noting that the company wants to do more to stay ahead of users' expectations on privacy.
The company is offering its new "Incognito" privacy control following intensifying scrutiny over how much user information technology companies collect and sell for advertising.
"We strongly believe that privacy and security are for everyone, not just a few," explains Pichai.
Incognito mode has long been offered on various browsers, including Google's Chrome, although signing in to a Google or other accounts generally negates it - or at least partially.
Apple's Safari and Mozilla's Firefox browsers already have various privacy tools built in to block sites from tracking people's online activity.
The latest version of Google's Android operating system, known as Android Q, will alert users when apps may be exploiting access to phone location data.
Now, "you can view and manage your recent activity and you can easily change your privacy settings," explains Pichai.
If an app, that's not currently in use, accesses their location it will allow users to turn that off.
Location data has been a sore subject for Google.
In 2018, an Associated Press investigation found that Google continued storing phone location data even when users turned off a "location history" setting in Android.
Werner Goertz, Research Director at the technology and advisory company, Gartner explains Google is, "bringing privacy toggles, privacy customization features that used to be setting at very low levels in the menu, in the user interface - they're bringing that up."
"And they're making privacy now something that users are aware of and that they can much more easily manage and toggle."  
Google's voice assistant will get a series of updates this year -  including one that lets it book rental cars and movie tickets using online forms - which will be available on Android phones later this year.
The technology behind this, called Duplex, was released to much fanfare last year when Google demonstrated it making a call to book a restaurant reservation.
"Google is doubling down with its device strategy as the link between cloud-based AI services and the physical world. And the main surprise and the main revelation for is how Google is able to bring AI, not only to the edge but into the device itself with advanced speech recognition running on the device and not necessarily requiring an internet connection to the cloud," explains Goertz.  
The Google Assistant will also get shrunk down so that it can work directly on a phone, eliminating the need to communicate with Google's cloud servers to understand some commands.
Tim Bajarin, a tech analyst at Creative Strategies, explains, "what they've done is they've given a greater level of power to Google's assistant. And more importantly, they're using AI (artificial intelligence) techniques in ways that are really making it more interactive, much more accurate and literally using voice to control getting apps and opening things and filling out forms."
The AI is also learning to offer more personalized suggestions to users by learning common contact names and addresses.

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