Google is borrowing from Apple's privacy playbook

Google wants us to know it's changed. While the company used to use the I/O stage to tout its "AI first" approach to the world, attendees of this developer conference heard a very different theme emerge.

Amid the talk of new products, research, and AI advancements, the company went out of its way to emphasize privacy. And, in an effort to show it's more than just obligatory lip service, they announced a number of updates meant to make its products more private.

Among the changes:

• Google is moving much of the machine learning that powers its assistant and other features from the cloud to the actual devices. This applies both to phones and to its new Nest Hub Max, which keeps all its new facial recognition features locally.

• In two of its most popular apps, search and maps, Google is beefing up privacy with a new incognito mode.

• In Chrome, users will get more control over which websites can track their activity via cookies. Read more...