Google might be ‘spying’ on you to find the next WhatsApp

[Chris Smith]

• Google Android Lockbox is supposedly a tool that Google uses to essentially “spy” on non-Google app activity on Android phones.
• The purpose of the data collection is for Google to enhance its products and potentially help it build competing products that could be popular with consumers.
• Google confirmed the existence of the tool, said the data is collected from users who agree to it, and that the information is anonymized. But Google did not say whether that data has been used to create products that can rival existing apps for third parties.

Facebook paid $19 billion on WhatsApp back in 2014, which seemed like an incredibly high price tag for a mobile chat app. WhatsApp already had a large user base, which only grew since then, so the bet kind of paid off for Facebook — kind of, because it’s unclear when Facebook will make its money back. But a few years later, we learned that Facebook used a different app, a VPN service called Onavo, to spy on rivals. That’s how it ended up buying a product that competed directly against Facebook Messenger.

Fast-forward to 2020, and Google will now have to explain a similar strategy. The company is using an internal tool that can measure your app activity, a new report says. The point is to allow Google to improve its products or create others. Rather than looking for the next WhatsApp, Google might be spying on your app usage to make its own hit apps. Google has already acknowledged that it uses the service, and future investigations will likely tell us more about how Google extracts and employs that data.

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Google might be ‘spying’ on you to find the next WhatsApp originally appeared on BGR.com on Sun, 26 Jul 2020 at 10:33:09 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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