With this week’s release of Android 16, Google added a new security feature to Android, called Advanced Protection. At-risk people—like journalists, activists, or politicians—should consider turning on. Here’s what it does, and how to decide if it’s a good fit for your security needs.
To get some confusing naming schemes clarified at the start: Advanced Protection is an extension of Google’s Advanced Protection Program, which protects your Google account from phishing and harmful downloads, and is not to be confused with Apple’s Advanced Data Protection, which enables end-to-end encryption for most data in iCloud. Instead, Google's Advanced Protection is more comparable to the iPhone’s Lockdown Mode, Apple’s solution to protecting high risk people from specific types of digital threats on Apple devices.
Advanced Protection for Android is meant to provide stronger security by: enabling certain features that aren’t on by default, disabling the ability to turn off features that are enabled by default, and adding new security features. Put together, this suite of features is designed to isolate data where possible, and reduce the chances of interacting with unsecure websites and unknown individuals.
For example, when it comes to enabling existing features, Advanced Protection turns on Android’s “theft detection” features (designed to protect against in-person thefts), forces Chrome to use HTTPS for all website connections (a feature we’d like to[...]