96 PCWorld OCTOBER 2019HERE’S HOW ANDROID 10’S BEST NEW FEATURES
separate app. Google is now including it in
the main Android settings, so you can
quickly set up an account and set limits on
your kids’ activities—as well as approve any
extra time requests. It never really made
sense that Family Link required a separate
download and app experience, so it’s nice
to see it all incorporated under one
umbrella now.PRIVACY
Over the past several releases, Google has
been working to make Android more private
and transparent. Version 10 continues the
effort, though many of the changes are
behind the scenes. For example, apps
cannot access clipboard data or device
information such as IMEI and serial numberwithout
privileged
permission.
There are
some powerful
new settings and
switches if you
know where to
find them. First
and foremost,
there’s a new
Privacy menu in
Settings, where
Google has
collected a bevy
of controls to
limit how much of your device the company
can access. Most of the controls remain
available in other menus—location history,
ads, lock screen content, etc.—but it’s useful
to have them all in one place. There’s also a
handy new Accessibility usage tab that tells
you if any apps have full access to your
device. In my case, 1Password was the only
app with full access, but this tab makes it easy
to shut down any nefarious ones on the list.
Inside the Privacy tab, you’ll also find a
new Permissions Manager. Other than the
new name, it’s exactly the same as the App
Permissions tab of old. Like before, you’ll
be able to see which apps are accessing
things like the camera, contacts, and
microphone. Note an important change to
the Location settings, however: Instead ofFocus mode lets you shut down apps that might distract you from the task at hand.