Following Apple’s moves earlier this year to increase user privacy on iPhone, Google has announced it will also let Android users opt out of being tracked and data-mined by smartphone app creators.

This will become available later this year, following an update of Google Play’s service.

As Google explains: “As part of Google Play services update in late 2021, the advertising ID will be removed when a user opts out of personalisation using advertising ID in Android Settings. Any attempts to access the identifier will receive a string of zeros instead of the identifier.

“To help developers and ad/analytics service providers with compliance efforts and respect user choice, they will be able to receive notifications for opt-out preferences. Additionally, apps targeting Android 12 will need to declare a Google Play services normal permission in the manifest file.”

Following this change, Google will provide an alternate solution to support what it called “essential use cases” such as analytics and fraud prevention.