Google CEO Sundar Pichai sets out a few of his Google’s user personal privacy efforts in a New York Times op-ed piece.
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In December, Google CEO Sundar Pichai yielded that his business might “do better” on assisting users comprehend how to secure their personal privacy in a tech world starving for user information.
“We want to simplify it,” Pichai informed members of Congress throughout a back-and-forth on a variety of personal privacy issues. In a viewpoint piece Tuesday in The New York Times, Pichai highlighted a few of those efforts, calling personal privacy “one of the most important topics of our time.”
Pichai acknowledged that having access to our information makes Google’s services run much better, however that users — all users — need to still anticipate their personal privacy to be safeguarded without needing to pay additional for the advantage.
“Privacy cannot be a luxury good offered only to people who can afford to buy premium products and services,” he composed. “Privacy must be equally available to everyone in the world.”
Earlier in the day, Pichai was on phase at Google’s I/O designer conference, where the business revealed a vast array of brand-new items and upgraded services, consisting of the Pixel 3A phone, Android Q, its Duplex and Assistant software application, and its AR and Lens efforts.
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Pichai’s op-ed piece comes amid turmoil in the tech community about how consumers’ data is used, sold and protected. Google has faced questions about the collection of user location data, the software flaws that exposed information from millions of accounts of Google+ users and the potential for privacy regulations.
To try to answer some of those questions, Pichai explained how Google uses anonymized data to make its products more helpful. He also said that the targeted ads served to users are based on activities such as past search results and not personal data found in apps such as Gmail or Docs.
While reviewing some of the privacy protection tools Google has offered over the years, Pichai touted new features the company introduced last week, including auto-delete controls and two-factor authentication for Android-based phones.
He also touted the work Google is doing with artificial intelligence to protect users’ privacy — specifically with a feature called federated learning that studies and learns from the data on your device but only sends the lesson learned to developers, not the raw data.
The company has drawn blowback for its AI operations, including a March backlash over its AI ethics board. Google disbanded the board after only a week.
“In the future, AI will provide even more ways to make products more helpful with less data,” he wrote.
In his conclusion, Pichai brought up a touchy subject in the tech community: legislation. Members of Congress have shown interest in moving toward a federal law governing consumer privacy, and Pichai said Google supports the US adopting privacy legislation similar to the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation.
“Legislation will help us work toward ensuring that privacy protections are available to more people around the world.”
