We care deeply about privacy. We also know that trust is built by transparency. This blog, and the technical paper reference within, is an example of that commitment: we describe an important new Android privacy infrastructure called Private Compute Core (PCC).
Some of our most exciting machine learning features use continuous sensing data — information from the microphone, camera, and screen. These features keep you safe, help you communicate, and facilitate stronger connections with people you care about. To unlock this new generation of innovative concepts, we built a specialized sandbox to privately process and protect this data.
Android Private Compute Core
PCC is a secure, isolated data processing environment inside of the Android operating system that gives you control of the data inside, such as deciding if, how, and when it is shared with others. This way, PCC can enable features like Live Translate without sharing continuous sensing data with service providers, including Google.
PCC is part of Protected Computing, a toolkit of technologies that transform how, when, and where data is processed to technically ensure its privacy and safety. For example, by employing cloud enclaves, edge processing, or end-to-end encryption we ensure sensitive data remains in exclusive control of the user.
How Private Compute Core works
PCC is designed to enable innovative features while keeping the data needed for them confidential from other subsystems. We do this by using techniques such as limiting Interprocess Communications (IPC) binds and using isolated processes. These are included as part of the Android Open Source Project and controlled by publicly available surfaces, such as Android framework APIs. For features that run inside PCC, continuous sensing data is processed safely and seamlessly while keeping it confidential.
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