Google has formally announced a slew of Android and Google apps features today, and among them is a neat new security tool for anyone who uses Google's autofill password manager on Chrome and Android. The company has added Chrome's Password Checkup to the operating system, checking your app logins against known breaches. The autofill tool is also getting support for password generation and biometric authentication.

Password Checkup is part of the "Autofill with Google" password manager pre-installed on Android. To use it, you first have to enable the autofill method, which you can do by going to your system settings, searching for Autofill, and selecting Google as your preferred autofill service.

Functionally, there's no difference between the Password Checkup in Chrome and Android, though having it enabled in the operating system itself allows it to check for app password breaches. In any case, the tool only uploads encrypted hashes of parts of your credentials, and the actual determination of whether a password has been breached happens locally on your phone. The feature is also only active when you use Google's autofill method — it won't upload or download anything if you use a competing password manager or none at all (most competitors have long had their own breach checks, so you're not losing out on anything if you use another product).

Last year, Google additionally introduced the ability to generate new passwords when you sign up for a service in an app by long-pressing the password field and selecting Autofill in the popup. It's also possible to add biometric authentication as an extra layer of security in the feature's settings. You can access them by searching your system settings for "Autofill with Google."

Password Checkup on Android apps and the other two new features are available on Android 9 and above for anyone who uses Google for autofill.

UPDATE: 2021/02/23 1:42pm PST BY MANUEL VONAU

The article initially introduced password suggestions and biometric authentication as brand-new, but they've been available since September 2020. We've updated our coverage accordingly.

Source: Google