I’m talking about things like approximate location, file/album specific media access, system wide camera and mic access, camera/mic use indicator, permission logs, data safety page for apps in play store etc.
Who are they trying to fool here? Any person who is truly aware about privacy knows Google cannot trusted in this domain. I don’t believe Google just decided to turn ‘not evil’ in one night and bring all these additions that actually have any impact on us end users. Google might just as well have the same access to our devices’ data if not more and they wouldn’t mind letting third party apps have access to it. Operating at such a humongous scale globally, being the lifeline of nearly all individuals and industries and predating off them as their primary source of revenue, they have complete power to ignore or silence the privacy minded individuals like us, yet they bothered to implement and provide us these features.
I cannot come up with any reasonable answer for this apart from what I think of this as some sort of publicity stunt to compare themselves with the privacy features Apple introduced in their softwares. What are your thoughts?
You answered your own question. Most people are still living in the Dark Ages when it comes to privacy awareness and just general tech literacy. To them, Google’s “privacy” features actually sound impressive.
As for why Google bothered to introduce such features: like most things in the mobile world it is about not losing ground to Apple in the features race. Google never cared until Apple introduced their own “privacy” features a few years ago. They know Apple is a dangerous competitor due to its ability to gaslight consumers into thinking it cares about them, so they are attempting to do the same here. It’s all about creating the illusion of being a pro-consumer company.