Google to tighten third-party apps access to Drive

MANILA, Philippines — Google on Friday announced that it will tighten security controls on all third-party apps for Drive.

The tech giant said that the move was part of Project Strobe, which is a Google-wide effort to review third-party developer access to Google account and Android device data.

“With this updated policy, we’ll limit the types of apps that have broad access to content or data via Drive APIs (application programming interface),” Google Drive product manager Hodie Meyers said in a blog post.

“Apps should move to a per-file user consent model, allowing users to more precisely determine what files an app is allowed to access,” the post read. “This means that only certain types of apps can request restricted scopes from consumer Google accounts.”

Google said that the restriction will most likely affect developers, and are advised to begin preparing ahead of time.

The tech giant added that such changes will take effect early next year. Meanwhile, it will start to notify affected developers of the new policy change.

“By announcing these kinds of changes now by allowing some for third-party developers to adapt to these changes, we are trying to balance our strong commitment to providing the strongest possible privacy protection for our users with the necessity the third-party developers be given some period of time to adapt to these new more restricted policies,” Google Chief Privacy Officer Keith Enright said in a Google Hangouts meeting on Friday. (Editor: Eden Estopace)