MOUNTAIN VIEW – Google wants users
to feel safe and secure when accessing websites and apps from their Android
devices. It’s why Google is encouraging developers will build in security
safeguards with its Google Identity Platform.
The Google Identity Platform,
announced Thursday while developers are in San Francisco for the first day of
Google’s annual I/O conference, is a collection of developer-specific software
programs, or tools, for adding password management, single sign-in across
related apps and websites, and identity authentication.
Google has been working to boost the
security of its Web and mobile apps. The company last year started tweaking
its search ranking algorithms to encourage more websites to use secure
encrypted connections. It also turned on
encryption for all Gmail messages last year, ensuring that anyone who
intercepts a message while it’s in transit sees only gibberish.
Developers can now hook into
Google’s Smart Lock password manager to save and retrieve their customers’
credentials, and use that information to sign them to Android-based apps and websites
viewed in the Chrome browser. Users can save their passwords to one device and
Smart Lock will populate that information across all their other devices. A few
companies are testing the new Smart Lock software, according to Google.
Netflix, for example, is using it to keeper users signed in and viewing content
even as they switch among devices. Other testers include Eventbrite, Orbitz,
Instacart and The New York Times.
The new Google Sign-In tool makes it
easy for developers to securely connect their apps or website to users’ Google
accounts, the company said. For example, customers can use their Gmail, Google
Play or Google+ accounts to sign into The New York Times.
And Google’s Identity Toolkit
provides “authentication in-a-box” that lets developers “do
sign-in the right way.” However, Google did not actually say what that
“right way” might be.
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