Google have made it a point this year of making sure that privacy is at the center of Android 12. The company repeated the point of privacy being at the forefront this year, and that includes Android 12.
The Android Private Compute Core is the engine behind Android 12's privacy features, making sure that the apps and the phone are following the privacy settings enabled by you.
To start with, the new privacy dashboard gives you an overall view of apps using the phone's location, camera, contacts, and much more.
However, a nice touch here is a simple overview in the form of a pie chart, of what has been accessed by the apps over the last 24 hours.
The notification center also has a quick access to disable any features of the phone that an app is using. For example, if Facebook is using the microphone while you're using another app, this part of notification center will show you explicitly that Facebook is using the microphone. Pressing this will disable the use of it to Facebook, and other apps if you wish.
Adding to this, Android 12 will also ask you for permission from an app to use a feature of the phone. You can select to allow it while running the app, only once, or not at all.
You can also opt to only provide an approximate location to some apps, such as weather apps which don't need to know exactly where you are.
And with features like Live Caption, Now Playing and Smart Reply, all of the audio and language processing happens on your device, so the data isn't sent elsewhere.
There's also locked folders, available across apps, which allow you to lock a specific folder with a fingerprint.
And there's the ability to unlock a Chromebook using your phone. Similar to the Apple Watch unlock feature for an Apple Mac, it will be a matter of having your Android 12 smartphone near to a Chromebook, and it will bring you to the home screen.
Finally, when using an app such as the camera, there will be a subtle UI hint that certain features of the camera are being used, similar to how it shows in Apple's iOS 15.
