Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
At the I/O developer conference on Tuesday, Google announced a range of new privacy measures, including a new partition within Android to manage machine learning data more securely.
Android’s new Private Compute Core will be a privileged space within the operating system, similar to the partitions used for passwords or sensitive biometric data. But instead of holding credentials, the computing core will hold data for use in machine learning, like the data used for the Smart Reply text message feature or the Now Playing feature for identifying songs.
While neither feature is sensitive in itself, they both draw on sensitive data like personal texts and real-time audio. The partition will make it easier for the operating system to protect…
