Google’s Advanced Protection for Vulnerable Users Comes to Android

With the rise of mercenary spyware and other targeted threats, tech giants like Apple, Google, and Microsoft have spent the last few years trying to figure out how to protect the digital lives of their most at-risk, vulnerable users around the world. On mobile, the launch of Apple's iOS Lockdown Mode in 2022 was one concerted effort to shed nonessential functionality in favor of maximum security—a trade-off most users wouldn't want to make, but that could be very worth it for a public figure, activist, journalist, or dissident living under daily scrutiny and threat of attack. For years, Google has offered a program for a similar demographic called Advanced Protection that focuses on adding additional layers of monitoring and security to vulnerable users' Google accounts, a core piece of many people's digital lives that could be devastating if compromised. Now, Google is extending Advanced Protection with a suite of features for Android 16. On Tuesday, the company announced an Advanced ... Read full article.