After the Google outage all but three of the projects in its in-house Area 120 incubator and changed it to work on AI projects at Google, one of the legacy efforts, coincidentally also an AI project, now officially out at Google. Checks, an AI-powered tool for checking mobile apps’ compliance with various privacy rules and regulations, is moving to Google proper as a privacy product aimed at mobile developers.
The checks originally made their debut in February 2022, although it was in development for some time before that. In his time at Area 120, it became one of the group’s largest projects, co-founders Fergus Hurley and Nia Castelly tell me, with 10 people fully dedicated to it and several others contributing less formally. The job titles of the founders at Google will now be, respectively, GM and Legal Lead for Checks.
The amount Google invested in the project was never disclosed, nor was the “valuation” of the parent company’s exit from the incubator, if the project was ever priced in the first place.
Checks does not disclose how many clients it has in total, but notes that they are in the gaming, healthcare, finance, education and retail sectors. A sample includes Miniclip, Rovio, Kongregate, Crayola and Yousician and in total the number of clients represented by their clients exceeds 3 billion.
The checks are one of those ideas that feel incredibly timely because they address an issue that is growing in importance for consumers: who will vote with their feet when they feel their privacy is in jeopardy. That, in turn, also puts more pressure on developers to get it right on the privacy front. App publishers these days are faced with an ever-increasing variety of rules and regulations on data protection and privacy, set not only by different countries and jurisdictions, but also by companies that operate platforms. When translated to how those regulations impact applications, there are potential issues on the front-end, but also on the back-end, with the way applications are coded and information moved from place to place to consider. .
Checks relies on artificial intelligence and machine learning to scan applications and their code to identify areas where there might be violations of privacy and data protection rules, and provides solutions to suggest how to fix it, tasks that would be much more difficult for a team of humans to run on their own. It’s already integrated with Google’s great language models and what it describes as “application understanding technologies” to power both what it identifies and hints for troubleshooting.
A dashboard allows users to monitor and triage issues in the areas of compliance monitoring, data monitoring, and store disclosure support (focusing specifically on Google Play data security). Since the service is also aimed at iOS developers, it’s unclear if it will add Apple App Store data security to that mix at some point. All of this can be monitored in real time in live applications, as well as while they are still in development.
We’ve reached out to Google for an update on the status of the other two projects that were saved from full closure after Area 120 changed focus. They include video dubbing solution Aloud and an as-yet-unnamed consumer product from the team that had previously created a bookmarking app Liist (which was acquired by Google).
At this time, Liist co-founder David Friedl still describes himself on LinkedIn as working on a stealth product in Area 120and out loud is still using an Area 120 URL, so it seems that they remain in a holding pattern. (We’ll update this when we hear more.)
Meanwhile, Area 120 is also seeing some revolving doors. Clay Bavor, who ran Area 120 among other things and sent a message about the big staff changes in January, he himself walked out the door just a month later. He has now teamed up with Bret Taylor, another former Googler who has an outsized track record that includes being the CTO of Facebook and co-CEO of Salesforce, to work on a mysterious start.
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