- cross-posted to:
- degoogle@europe.pub
- privacy@europe.pub
- cross-posted to:
- degoogle@europe.pub
- privacy@europe.pub
More than half of Americans reported receiving at least one scam call per day in 2024. To combat the rise of sophisticated conversational scams that deceive victims over the course of a phone call, we introduced Scam Detection late last year to U.S.-based English-speaking Phone by Google public beta users on Pixel phones.
We use AI models processed on-device to analyze conversations in real-time and warn users of potential scams. If a caller, for example, tries to get you to provide payment via gift cards to complete a delivery, Scam Detection will alert you through audio and haptic notifications and display a warning on your phone that the call may be a scam.
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It’s pretty easy to imagine all the ways this technology can because a nightmare. Maybe Russia puts AI spies on your phone that listen to see if you say anything bad about Putin to the person you are talking to and then pings their police and tells them what you said. Fuck you google for creating this technology.
Oh, and if you are part of the vast majority of people who aren’t going to fall for a random ‘gift-card’ scam, this AI will always be running constantly draining your battery anyway.
this AI will always be running constantly draining your battery anyway
It’s part of the phone app and only engages when you get a call, my god the lack of understanding on a feature that’s been out for years now in this thread is actually crazy
It’s not been out for years.
New AI-Powered Scam Detection Features to Help Protect You on Android
March 4, 2025
AI call screening has been on Pixels since 2017/2018, this appears to be a mild update to how that process works while rolling it out to all of android rather than just the pixel line
This tech isn’t new at all
Part of the reason I haven’t yet moved away from Google services on my pixel is because of the call screening and anti-spam features. I screen unknown callers pretty much all the time so Google is listening if they call me anyway. I’m fine with that, knowing A. That the callers get a heads up that they’re talking to an AI and being recorded and B. That the ones who are human and trying to scam me generally don’t call back once they know the line is being actively recorded.
There’s no feature parity for this on any of the roms I would move to. Taking it a step further is unnecessary for me, and I’ll probably opt out. But I can fully understand why someone might want it (for their elderly family members for instance).
You can get most of these features with a Google voice number and use it on any forwarded number
I have a Google voice number. You actually can’t. You can get spam filtering which works sort of but definitely not in the same way. I have never had a Voice call use Google’s call screening on graphene os for instance because it doesn’t work. I have graphene os running on a pixel 8 pro for the purposes of seeing what works and doesn’t work to see if I can ever daily drive it. I like graphene os a lot but rely too much on certain Google specific android features and that’s what my first comment was generally talking about.
So far as I know, if your device uses their Gemini Nano LLM, it doesn’t reach back to their servers at all unless you OPT IN to the ‘Help service inprove’.
This feature though and a few other calling features has made me switch from iPhone single handedly, I was receiving 6-10 spam calls a day, now I see none because they’re screened in the background. It’s fantastic. I’m hooked on these Pixel features and only hope more move to becoming on device features with the ability to opt in to sending certain things off device.
So, I have several legacy Google Assistant compatible devices that do not work with Google’s new AI. As a result I haven’t switched over to Gemini for pretty much anything and I probably won’t. I’m currently building a Home Assistant system to take the place of Google Assistant when it finally sunsets but the going is slow (I have limited time to dedicate to that specifically at the moment). But for phone specific use, I’m taking the wait and see approach.
Home Assistant is such an awesome tool. I use it every day and shamefully have it linked to my Google Home so Gemini can turn on and off devices when prompted. Aside from that, I could just go the route of setting up a local LLM on my server and having Home Assistant be my new assistant on device so it doesn’t use Google at all.
I definitely recommend Home Assistant though, between the iPhone users and now myself on Android in our home, it makes everything appear native to the end user. Now I just use Zigbee and Zwave devices for everything since they’re more reliable and much cheaper.
My biggest issue right now is trying to figure out what I need/want to work vs things I don’t need. This list is one I’ve been keeping of things that I want it to do/be compatible with:
-Weather
-Calendar
-News/RSS Feed
-Light Panel
-Media Panel
-Search Query Panel
-Use of Voice controls
-Singular touchscreen hub and android phone
-Works with Google home max speakers and Google nest mini speakers
-Chromecast equivalent functionality
It’s based on the things I use Google Assistant for daily or at the very least weekly. Most all of it can be done with an android tablet and my raspberry pi. But implementing it to be the way I want isn’t as simple (hasn’t been as simple for me) and I think that’s down to following guides for a lot of things that weren’t necessarily intended to work together cohesively.
Híjole
Ah, but what if I use a British accent? Got em
WTF. What could possibly go wrong. Flip phone here I come.
Spam protection is turned on automatically, and you’ll be notified when this happens. You can turn it off anytime in your settings:
Open Google Messages . At the top right, tap your Profile picture or Initials.
Tap Messages settings and then Spam protection. You’ll only find “Spam protection” if it’s available on your device. Turn Enable spam protection on or off.
I’m not seeing in my message settings. Anyone else?
I had to go into Protection and Safety within the Messages setting, and then Spam Protection was in there.
This is scam protection not spam protection. The beta was just introduced and you have to opt-in.
They said it’s rolling out in beta. Spam Protection is already in the Messages app. Scam Protection is coming soon. But to listen to telephone audio that means they want to add it into the native dialer\phone app. Google has a dialer app named “Phone” with a Spam filter feature currently.
I assume that’s what is coming – a.i. into the dialer\phone app.
Nice, wholesale illegal wire tapping. It’s OK, it’s legal because it’s AI and Google is totally not storing any recordings. They say this is all on-device, but that’s an “oops” or equivalent from them hoovering up recordings of every phone call you use one of their
surveillance endpointsphones on.heavy /s
What do you mean, “illegal?” If the phone user consents to turning it on, that makes it legal.
I hate to defend Google, but I will absolutely defend single-party consent for recording. Don’t like it? Don’t fucking call me in the first place. It absolutely grinds my gears when shitty software (including from Google) plays an obnoxious warning message when I want to record a call, even though I have the right to do so without warning.
I read that it’s “opt out” not “opt in”.
You need to opt in to the public beta. Once it’s out of beta… Who knows!
In many places call recording (or indeed processing of personal information which is highly likely to be present in phone calls) requires consent to be legal. I highly doubt this kind of processing is legal in the EU without both parties consenting.
I highly doubt this kind of processing is legal in the EU without both parties consenting.
In Finland recording calls and meetings you participate in is legal, without need to give notice or ask for consent. And necessary, because spoken contracts are as valid as written ones, and you need to be able to prove the existence of such contract.
I haven’t heard of any EU countries where call recording would not be legal. Would be interesting to hear from people who live in EU.
As is stated, the call is processed locally in the user’s device. If that holds true, there is no recording and no third party processing going on. Your point does not make sense.
The person owning the phone where the processing takes place, is the processor of the data in this case. That still requires consent from the data subject per gdpr.
No, that’s ridiculous.
This Regulation does not apply to the processing of personal data: […] © by a natural person in the course of a purely personal or household activity;
Fair, I was not aware of that exception. It does seem to cover this case, assuming Google is actually not sending any data outside of the phone, use it for further training etc.
It sounds illegal because if one user opt ins for wire tapping, she / he needs to inform other people on the line about it is being wire tapped.
Read the article at all. It’s on device processing nothing gets sent anywhere.
They say so. They always say so :-)
Jokes on them. I don’t have phone conversations
and when i do, they’re not in English
Or at least not in conversational English. Me “The cheese is old and moldy.” Wife “Roses eggs” Me “Bach unaccounted.”
No wheezing the juice!
Buddddiey
so basically you communicate through a string of auto-generated usernames. clever. do you have a rotating cipher? that’s the way to do it if you want to stay ahead of the Nazis
haha very cryptic, i love that ^^
In plain English this means
Me “Have you checked for eggs recently? I just saw a bunch in the nesting boxes. Too many for one day.” Wife “Yeah, it’s been a while. Even Rose [the duck], who hasn’t laid an egg in five years, probably laid one.” Me “I haven’t seen our special needs cat, the one we trapped as part of a TNR run on our own property, in the last 12 hours. Have you seen that blessed dumb beast who walks like he is drunk? If you see him now could you bring him inside?”
Any sufficiently developed culture has its own language. In this house we go out of our way to make obtuse inside joke references to keep each other on our toes.
amazing compression factor, say a novel-worth of information in a couple of words
One day you come home, you see all your stuff is in boxes. Then you see a note on the fridge, it says: “Womp womp” You fall to your knees and break down in tears. Through your tears you see another note underneath the fridge. You reach for the note. The note reads: “Womp, womp?” You began to laugh maniacally. You hear footsteps, you stop laughing. Your wife stands behind you. She says: “Kept you on your toes didn’t I?”
Always read the fine print.
Give me call screening and filtering options so we can ignore the calls in the first place
More AI testing…
If enabled, Scam Detection will beep at the start and during the call to notify participants the feature is on. You can turn off Scam Detection at any time, during an individual call or for all future calls.
Scammers will quickly catch on then the real trick will be to just play that beep without any of the ai stuff.
The beep is legal compliance, because some states require notification of call recording. Same reason you hear “this call may be recorded for quality assurance purposes”.
So, wait, Google can record calls, but we can’t?
Member when they sucked up everyone’s wifi passwords and the world was like ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
WiFi passwords? I think you mean SSIDs (wifi name).
No they slurped up the pw’s too back in the day. Before WEP2? I forget.
Hm. The intertubes tells me it was unencrypted data. https://www.tomshardware.com/news/google-wifi-street-cars-spy-lawsuit-settlement,39998.html
Oh. Right. It collected unencrypted (i.e. email) passwords. Allll niiiice and legal, probably. https://www.socialmediatoday.com/content/google-says-collecting-data-unencrypted-wifi-networks-isnt-illegal
They calls are not recorded, are they? They are transcribed live.
It’s effectively the same thing.
Whether or not the recording is kept or not, it’s using the same function.
If that counts as recording then all phone calls are recorded by your microphone, in order to send the sound to the other party.
Most people here: Yes, I bought an advertiser’s device, hooked up in a million ways to that advertiser’s services, who’s well known for monitoring every aspect of the life of every person they can, but how dare they monitor this part?
More than half of Americans reported receiving at least one scam call per day in 2024.
Bullshit.
Dumb as I am, I have a Pixel… the good thing though? Graphene OS is an option.
deleted by creator
…is this some sort of joke my Nordic brain can’t understand? I need to go hug a councilman.
