{"id":15126,"date":"2025-05-13T19:50:49","date_gmt":"2025-05-13T19:50:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/topat10.com\/?p=15126"},"modified":"2025-05-13T19:50:49","modified_gmt":"2025-05-13T19:50:49","slug":"googles-advanced-protection-for-vulnerable-users-comes-to-android","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/topat10.com\/?p=15126","title":{"rendered":"Google\u2019s Advanced Protection for Vulnerable Users Comes to Android"},"content":{"rendered":"


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With the rise<\/span> of mercenary spyware and other targeted threats, tech giants like Apple, Google, and Microsoft have spent the last few years trying to figure out how to protect the digital lives of their most at-risk, vulnerable users around the world. On mobile, the launch of Apple’s iOS Lockdown Mode<\/a> in 2022 was one concerted effort to shed nonessential functionality in favor of maximum security\u2014a trade-off<\/a> most users wouldn’t want to make, but that could be very worth it for a public figure, activist, journalist, or dissident living under daily scrutiny and threat of attack. For years, Google has offered a program for a similar demographic<\/a> called Advanced Protection that focuses on adding additional layers<\/a> of monitoring and security to vulnerable users’ Google accounts, a core piece of many people’s digital lives that could be devastating if compromised. Now, Google is extending Advanced Protection with a suite of features for Android 16<\/a>.<\/p>\n

On Tuesday, the company announced an Advanced Protection mode<\/a> for phones running the newest version of Android. At its core, the mode is designed around imposing strong security settings on all apps and services to silo data as much as possible and reduce interactions with unsecured web services and previously unknown, untrusted individuals. Advanced Protection on Android is meant to be as usable and flexible as possible, though, leaning on Google’s rapidly expanding on-device AI scanning capabilities to provide monitoring and alerts without having to completely eliminate features. Still, the mode imposes restrictions that can’t be turned off, like blocking phones from connecting to historic 2G data networks and disabling Chrome’s Javascript optimizer, which could alter or break some web functionality on some sites.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are two classes of things that we use to defend the user. One is you obviously harden the system, so you try to lock things down, you prevent many forms of attacks,” says Dave Kleidermacher, vice president of engineering at Android\u2019s security and privacy division. “But two is you can’t always prevent every attack entirely. But if you can detect that you’ve been compromised, you can take some sort of corrective action. In consumer security on mobile this detection has never really been a possibility, so that’s one of the big things we’ve done here.”<\/p>\n

This monitoring and detection capability, known as Intrusion Logging, uses end-to-end encryption to indelibly store logs from your device in the cloud such that they can’t be accessed by Google or any party aside from you, but also in a form that can’t be deleted or modified, even if your device and Google account are compromised.<\/p>\n

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