All Users’ Privacy Assurance: Wholistic Strategy for AI Privacy on Android
The personal data stored in your smartphone plays a pivotal role in assisting you with daily tasks. Android is seamlessly incorporating cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI) features, such as Gemini, a trusted assistant proficient in handling essential life tasks. Thus, ensuring your privacy and security on Android remains a top priority. By pioneering responsible AI techniques and advanced privacy technologies like Private Compute Core and federated learning, we have ensured that our approach to the Gemini assistant experience on Android aligns with our existing Secure AI framework, AI Principles, and Privacy Principles.
We have consistently protected your data by utilizing a comprehensive stack of top-tier secure infrastructure and technology, providing end-to-end security in a manner unique to Google. From ensuring privacy on-device for sensitive data handling to leveraging the world’s leading cloud infrastructure, here are six essential methods through which we maintain the confidentiality and security of your information.
- Avoiding delegation to an external AI service provider.
Gemini Apps can assist you with intricate personal tasks, from formulating workout plans to guiding you in creating a resume. All these operations occur seamlessly within Google’s ecosystem. The primary processing is executed by Gemini within Google’s secure cloud infrastructure, with no handovers to unidentified third-party chatbots or AI providers.
- Privacy for sensitive tasks with on-device AI, even in offline scenarios.
For certain AI functionalities, such as Summarize in Recorder on Pixel, which benefit from enhanced data privacy or processing efficiency, we employ on-device AI. Gemini Nano, the first multimodal model tailored for mobile devices, facilitates on-device AI processing for critical tasks without depending on cloud connectivity, allowing you to benefit from features like text summarization even when offline.
- Secure, cloud-based infrastructure of the highest caliber, designed with privacy at its core.
For AI tasks that necessitate data already present in the cloud or mandate complex requirements exceeding on-device processing capabilities, we rely on Google’s remarkably secure cloud infrastructure. Supported by Google’s world-class security and privacy infrastructure and protocols, these data centers benefit from the same stringent defenses that have safeguarded Google products for billions of users over 20 years. Hence, when requesting Gemini to locate specific details in your lease agreement stored on Google Drive, the data is shielded by advanced monitoring against unauthorized access or misuse. Rigorous software supply chain controls are enforced to ensure that only approved and verified code runs within our cloud environment.
- Empowering users to manage interactions with Gemini Apps.
We have meticulously crafted the Gemini Apps experience with attention to how you engage with it and assert control. You have the flexibility to review and select the Gemini functionalities you desire – precisely when and where they are most beneficial. At any given time, you can review your Gemini Apps conversations, pin them, or delete them. Android also offers control over how apps like Gemini respond when your device is locked.
- Innovating new privacy methodologies.
Our ongoing efforts focus on devising novel approaches to enhance the privacy and security of your data further. We persist in innovating and advancing privacy-preserving technologies, such as sealed computing technology, which can process sensitive workloads in a secure cloud enclave, enhancing privacy. Sealed computing guarantees that neither Google nor any other entity can access the data, effectively extending the user’s device and its security confines into our cloud infrastructure, creating a virtual smartphone in the cloud.
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Introducing heightened transparency standards.
Transparency forms a fundamental element of Android’s open-source foundation. Android binary transparency offers everyone the ability to verify the integrity of the operating system code against a transparency log, similarly to authenticating an individual’s identity through fingerprint biometrics. Within sealed computing environments, binary transparency extends to encompass reproducible builds. This ensures that anyone can reconstruct the trusted firmware base and confirm whether the resultant binaries align with what is remotely attested as running in the production environment, as well as published in public transparency logs.
Our Assurance in Safeguarding Your Data
Just like with all Google products, we are committed to enabling you to relish the advantages of Android without concerns regarding security and privacy. Hence, we invest significantly in integrating top-notch protective measures into our products and services right from inception. We eagerly anticipate the continuation of our efforts to make AI intuitive and helpful, enabling you to focus on what truly matters, while we uphold the protection of your data.
Stay tuned for forthcoming details about our comprehensive AI privacy approach in an upcoming whitepaper.
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