In an attempt to protect old android phones from malware and malicious ad trackers, Google is set to unveil a new privacy protection feature to old android devices.
With the release of Android 11, Google had introduced a feature called auto-resetting permissions. What the feature does is to prevent an app from accessing storage, microphone, cameras, and other sensitive features if the app hasn’t been used for months.
The average smartphone user has between 60 to 90 apps on their device, according to a report by Broadcom. Most of these apps request some sort of information about you and the device you are using. Most apps will request permission to your camera, files and media, microphone, and even your location.
In android 11, you are required to provide access to your data to an app if it hasn’t been opened for a period of time. This prevents apps from collecting data in the background without permission
Google will also be bringing this feature to old android phones so that the app doesn’t get access to data from these phones.
Android phones running Android 6 and above will automatically get this privacy feature and Google estimates that this will protect billions of android phones.
Google will release this feature in December to all android devices running between android 6 and 10 and comes with Google play services. According to Google, the feature “will automatically be enabled on devices with Google Play Services that are running Android 6.0 API level 23 or higher.”
Users of old android phones need to enable the feature manually and certain apps may request users to turn off this feature in case it needs to run in the background.
If you have any old Android phone that is left unused, you should remove your Google accounts and factory reset the phone to prevent apps or someone else from getting access to your personal data that is saved in old phones.
– Businessday