After jettisoning all but three of the projects at its in-house incubator Area 120 and shifting it to work on AI projects across Google, one of the legacy efforts-an AI project, coincidentally-is now officially exiting to Google. Checks, an AI-powered tool to check mobile apps for compliance with various privacy rules and regulations, is moving into Google proper as a privacy product aimed at mobile developers.

Checks launched in February 2022, though it was in development for several years leading up to that. When it was at Area 120, it became one of the biggest projects there, co-founders Fergus Hurley and Nia Castelly told me, with 10 dedicated people working on it and plenty more who were contributing in a less full-time way. The founders will now take on titles of GM and Legal Lead within Google for Checks.

Google's investment in the project was not disclosed as well as the valuation of the exit to the parent company from the incubator. The company, however, revealed that there was, in fact, a valuation, and the company has grown since its launch.

The company is not releasing the total number of customers but notes that they are in gaming, health, finance, education, and retail. A sampling includes Miniclip, Rovio, Kongregate, Crayola, and Yousician, and in total the number of customers represented by its customers is over 3 billion.

Checks will be housed in the Developer X division. "What Fergus, Nia and the entire Google Checks team have achieved is one of the toughest things to do. Focus on customer needs, nimble execution has worked well for them; it's now time to move forward on this next phase of Checks," said Jeanine Banks in a statement.

Checks is one of those ideas that feels so time-sensitive in that it speaks to an issue that's growing in importance for consumers — who will vote with their feet when they feel that their privacy is in jeopardy. And that in turn also puts more pressure on developers to get things right on the privacy front. App developers today face an increasingly large number of regulations and guidelines surrounding data privacy and protection, not just country-specific rules like GDPR in Europe and CCPA in California (and in the U.S.) created across different geographies and jurisdictions, but also by platform companies within their own compliance endeavors.

Those regulations translate, in terms of their impact on apps, into a number of issues at the front end, not to mention at the back end, around how apps are coded and how information moves from one place to another. A spaghetti bowl of all these issues, solutions in one part could bug or affect another and make for less smooth user experiences to boot.

Checks relies on artificial intelligence and machine learning to scan apps and their code in search of areas where violations of privacy and data protection rules might be lurking, providing remediation on how to fix it — tasks far tougher for a team of humans to execute on their own. It's already integrated with Google's large language models and what it describes as "app understanding technologies" to power what it identifies and make suggestions for fixing issues.
There's a dashboard letting users monitor and triage issues in the areas of compliance monitoring, data monitoring and store disclosure support-that's focused specifically on Google Play data safety. With the service also targeted at iOS developers, it is not entirely clear if this will add data safety in the Apple App Store at any point into that mix. All of this is immediately available in real time on live apps as well as when still in development.

We have also reached out to Google for an update on the status of the two other projects that were spared from all-out closure after Area 120 shifted its focus. They are video dubbing solution Aloud, and an as yet unnamed consumer product from the team which had earlier built a bookmarking app called Liist-that got acquired by Google.

And, at the time of writing this, Liist's co-founder David Friedl is still out there using LinkedIn to refer to himself as working on some stealth product for Area 120, and Aloud still uses an Area 120 URL, so they seem to be holding it in limbo, at least for now. We'll update this when/and if we hear more.

Meanwhile, Area 120 itself is experiencing some revolving doors. Clay Bavor, who among other projects was running Area 120 and who messaged staff in January of the big changes, left just a month later. Now he's teamed up with Bret Taylor, another ex-Googler whose track record is too big to ignore, having been Facebook's CTO and the co-CEO of Salesforce, to work on some mystery startup.