Google has for several years been collecting application usage data collected from Android phones to develop and advance its own competing applications, a new report alleges.
The project, called Android Lockbox, “collects confidential data from Android users” for use at Google and has been in effect since at least 2013, reports The Information.
An in-house team that tracks global usage of Google’s own apps “has also used Lockbox data in third-party apps to show executives how Google’s services performed compared to its rivals,” the sources told The Information. The data was used earlier this month in India, where Google planned to launch a competing app to TikTok.
The information is collected through Google’s mobile services, the collection of applications and APIs such as Google, Chrome, Gmail, Google Drive and Google Maps that generally comes pre-installed with Android.
Google told The Information that it does access usage data in other Android developer apps, but only through an API that has also been available to outside developers since 2014. While the API grants developers access to information about phones in which its applications are installed However, Google has a much broader vision of the wide range of all Android phones worldwide.
A representative from Google told The Information, “The API does not obtain any information about activity in the application and our collection of this information is disclosed and controllable by users,” but did not comment on how Google uses that or any other information. to research or develop competitors for other applications.
Sounds familiar?
If The Information’s claims are accurate, antitrust regulators are likely to have many questions for Google.
As we have explained here in Ars, antitrust law is not just about monopolies. It is also a broad set of behaviors that are considered anti-competitive Under the law. Using its power as one of the largest companies in the world to pressure startups that could eventually become serious and serious competitors is one of those anti-competitive behaviors, and regulators don’t like it.
Four of the largest technology firms in the United States — Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Apple, and Facebook — are undergoing a series of state, federal, and international antitrust investigations right now, investigating whether, and if so, to what extent . Those companies grew and maintained their market power through unclear and illegal tactics.
Facebook, in particular, has been scrutinized for using data on competitors in much the same way that the new report accuses Google of doing so. The social giant used a VPN it acquired, called Onavo, to redirect traffic through Facebook’s servers, where it could be logged and analyzed. Those data allowed Facebook to see which competing apps were growing in popularity in order to buy those startups or launch competitors.
One of those competitors was Snapchat. Last fall, reports emerged that Snap for several years maintained a file, called the Voldemort Project, documenting Facebook’s attempts to first acquire it, and then, after the acquisition failed, copy the key features of Snapchat.
It is also widely assumed that American researchers are investigating how Apple can leverage data from the iOS App Store to inform its own software development. The EU is also investigating how Apple privileges its own apps after Spotify filed a complaint last year against the company.
