Google has announced that the next major iteration of Android will prevent thieves from jailbreaking stolen phones. A smart feature known as Theft Detection Lock will debut in Android 15, which was announced during Google’s I/O developer conference last week, but it’s not expected to launch until later this year. Google also confirmed the biggest shakeup to the search engine since it launched in the late 90s during the same two-day event.
Google says its artificial intelligence (AI) model can detect when a smartphone has been stolen from its owner — while Android 15 automatically locks the screen to prevent thieves from getting into the device.
Google has also made improvements to its Remote Lock feature, which makes it easier for users to lock their device after it goes missing
GOOGLE PRESS SERVICE
Without a fingerprint scan, face scan, correct password or PIN, thieves won’t be able to access your phone’s contents. It will also prevent criminals from dumping the handset for sale on the second-hand market.
Until now, prying the phone out of someone’s hands bypassed the need to unlock the phone.
Google said its AI has been trained to detect “common theft-related motion” by reading signals from the device, such as the accelerometer reading a sudden jolt when someone on a bicycle snatches the phone from a user’s hand and then moves at high speed. to instantly lock your device.
It will add a number of tools to better protect and hide apps that may contain sensitive data that thieves might be interested in, as well as features to make it easier to remotely lock your phone after it’s stolen.
Android vice president of development Dave Burke said the new theft detection tool was partly inspired by feedback from employees and users in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and London, where he said high rates of phone theft were reported.
“Some pretty scary statistics I found out very recently (were) in Sao Paulo, a phone is stolen every five minutes, and in London, a phone is stolen every six minutes,” he said. “It’s a really big problem, and we started thinking about it, what can we do, and we started studying (the issue).”
He added that the company studied videos of phone thefts on bicycles to develop the new feature.
Last October, Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley and London Mayor Sadiq Khan held a meeting with tech companies, including Google, about phone companies doing more to tackle phone theft after a rise in incidents in the capital over the previous 12 months.
LATEST DEVELOPMENTS
The new feature is joined by other tools that Google says will “increase your device’s security against theft with new and improved protection features that will make thieves think twice about trying.”
It includes a new Private Space tool that allows users to create a separate area on their phone to host apps that contain sensitive data – such as banking apps – that can be hidden and locked with a separate pin.
Additionally, Google is introducing a new Remote Lock feature that allows users to remotely lock their devices using just their phone number and an optional pre-set secret question.
Google said that allowing this process to be done using a phone number was done because “many users are in shock and stress after their phone goes missing and can’t remember their Google Account password,” which is used to access the Find My Device app. where phones can be locked remotely.
The tech giant announced that it will also be rolling out new on-device AI tools that will detect apps that may be engaging in fraud.
Real-time threat detection tools will analyze how apps are behaving and use permissions given to them by users to monitor when they are engaging in suspicious behavior, alerting both users and Google when such activity is spotted.