China’s five leading Android-system smartphone brands – Honor, Lenovo, Oppo, Vivo and Xiaomi – have formed a platform to promote a new privacy permission system, marking a key step towards standardising privacy protection among Android users in the artificial intelligence era.
As Chinese smartphone makers rush to equip AI features, the issue of user data collection has become the focus of debate. The initiative by the five brands aims to strike a balance between privacy protection and user data access.
The brands will jointly explore new mechanisms in data access to ensure “transparent and controllable” data authorisation, according to a statement from the Intelligent Terminal Alliance (ITGSA), a non-profit organisation formed by the companies.
The initiative is based on the principle of what is “minimum and necessary”, and will handle data access through native API-based system controls and a platform review and control mechanism.
The platform will identify five types of high-frequency data use scenarios, such as contacts, photos and videos. The privacy permissions will be divided into system level and application level. For example, photos can only be accessed after a user selects the file in the application. When photos are displayed as thumbnails in the system, the application will not have access to the files.
