Google on Wednesday announced a plethora of improvements to its existing products and services at Google I/O 2023. To continue its commitment to protect people from cyber threats, the tech behemoth has announced an array of security features at its annual developer conference. For a company that's known for organizing the whole world’s information, it essentially boils down to digital reliability and user privacy.
Among the most important projects is the search giant's recent move towards the password-less era. Due to the fact that two-factor authentication isn't necessarily secure enough, supporting passkeys on Google accounts for password-less login should greatly help reduce the risks posed by phishing and SIM jacking. Keep in mind that it's still an optional feature, as Google doesn't have any plan to force users to switch to Passkey for signing just yet.
The company has also come up with a handy add-on for its reverse image searching module. Dubbed as "About this image," the AI-powered tool will simplify the process of gathering metadata required to validate the trustworthiness of visual results. You can find a whole lot of contextual information, e.g. where the image(s) might have first popped up, when the target as well as the similar pictures were first indexed by Google's crawler, where else they are being linked (like a news portal or a fact-finding website), and more.
Safe Browing gets a touch of AI assistance too, and it can now identify compromised sites and phishing actors faster than ever. Google is also bringing Gmail-esque spam detection mechanism to Drive, which means you will soon be able to classify Drive contents into spam view. Furthermore, organizations and platforms benefited from Google's Content Safety API can now utilize the same for reviewing potential Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) in video contents as well.
Keeping personalized information such as location data private requires that people have better control over how they are being used by third-parties. Google said it had revised the way of deleting recent searches on Map, so that you can remove a particular result with just a tap instead of jumping through hoops. The company will also introduce a dedicated “Data deletion” option within an app’s Google Play Data safety section, in order to streamline the purging process of your account or other associated data. This is actually related to Android 14, as the upcoming major version of Google's OS is expected to raise the bar when it comes to location data sharing.
Last but not least, Google is expanding access to its dark web report facility to anyone with a Gmail account in the US. Previously, it was only available to the Google One subscribers. If you're not from the US, but want detailed insight to see whether your personal information has landed on the dark web, no need to worry, as Google will further branch this feature out to certain international markets in the near future.
Source: Google Blog