Google will let Android users opt out of being tracked by advertisers on their smartphone apps, a big win for privacy advocates, after Apple made the same move on iPhones earlier this year.
The choice not to be tracked will become available in late 2021 using a Google software update, the tech giant said in a support website post on Thursday.
Google said it would allow people to opt out of interest-based advertising or ad personalization in order to give users more control over their data and ensure greater privacy.
The policy change comes a few months after Apple announced a new app-tracking transparency feature that requires apps to request permission from users before tracking all their online activity on other apps and websites.
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Unlike Apple’s privacy feature, with which users have to choose actively to opt in to tracking, Android users will have to opt out of ad tracking.
Despite users being able to opt out of personalized ads on Android devices for many years now, this feature hasn’t actually stopped app developers from being able to track many users’ phone activities. Google is planning to announce a solution to this problem next month.
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App developers and social media platforms, such as Facebook, are expected to resist Google’s policy change because of losses to their revenue that will come from users not agreeing to have their data collected.
