Users data of non-Google apps being spied by Google to develop YouTube 'Shorts, TikTok rival app

Google is reportedly keeping tabs to know how its users interact with rival Android apps, selectively monitoring how the users interact with non-Google apps via an internal programme to make its own products better.

San Francisco: According to a report in The Information, an internal programme at Google known as "Android Lockbox" gives employees access to data on how Android users interact with popular, non-Google apps like TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram.

"When YouTube was planning the rollout of its rival to TikTok in India earlier this month, employees turned to a valuable source of market research: how people in the country were using TikTok and its competitors on Android", the report claimed.

The programme works via Google Mobile Services (GMS).

"In some cases, such as YouTube in India, this data helps Google advance its own competing apps, say the people, all of whom requested anonymity to speak freely," the report added.

Users data of non-Google apps being spied by Google to develop YouTube 'Shorts, TikTok rival app

"Google is also thought to have used the internal programme to plan the launch of its TikTok competitor called Shorts", according to the report.

The US government is set to grill Google along with other tech giants over its dominance in their fields of Search and anti-market practices. The panel announced its antitrust probe into the tech giants in June last year.

Google isn't the only company that's been accused of such data gathering practices. In 2017, The Wall Street Journal reported that Facebook used a VPN service called Onavo to monitor rival services.

Onavo Protect -- a Facebook's software that was going to get the functionality -- was billed as a piece of VPN software. Onavo was used primarily to gather information about what other apps Facebook users were using on their mobile devices. It was shut down in 2019.

(Inputs from IANS)