For mobile app developers, Google’s internal team today launched a tool called “Checks”. In a rapidly changing regulatory and policy environment, leverage AI technology to identify potential privacy and compliance issues in applications.
This free solution will be available to Android and iOS app developers of all sizes, where they can analyze their apps and then receive a report of actionable insights on how to resolve the issues they find.
Checks were co-founded by Fergus Hurley (General Manager) and Nia Castelly (Legal Head), who has developed the project over the past two years as part of Area 120, Google’s internal incubator.
The Checks team has previously built tools like Android Vitals to address developer technical challenges and has the idea to use AI to address privacy compliance challenges, as it is now.
Today’s app developers have to keep up with some updated regulations and policies, from GDPR requirements in Europe to new rules enforced by the app stores themselves. At the same time, consumers have become wiser about the trade-offs involved in using free software – they now often wonder to what extent an app respects their privacy, how their data is accessed, stored or shared, etc.
Even if a developer’s application follows all the rules, the SDK the developer uses may not follow the rules, or the SDK’s data-sharing behavior may change over time, presenting another compliance challenge.
With Checks, the idea is to make achieving compliance an easier process than it is now, the team said. To use Checks, developers submit their applications for privacy compliance analysis, which includes automated review, and Human review at certain service tiers.
The free tier can be used to complete the new data security portion of Google Play, while the paid tiers (primarily for core, premium, and enterprise) are designed to meet the needs of professional developers and larger enterprises, including those developing on iOS. There are no technical requirements or prerequisites to use Checks, it runs its analysis on physical and virtual devices.