This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
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'm so tired of this. It feels like an onslaught.
Back in 2008 or whatever I let Google handle my voicemails, and I enjoyed the convenience of the machine-transcriptions.
Now I wonder if my voicemails are being studied and trained on or whatever.
Ah, but what if I use a British accent? Got em
More than half of Americans reported receiving at least one scam call per day in 2024.
Bullshit.
Americans still actively use telephony services?
I just don't use the Phone and SMS apps. Haven't for years. It's old tech that's only used by bots and scammers.
Get with the times. Just block them. You're basically putting an ad blocker on.
What you use? Signal?
Give me call screening and filtering options so we can ignore the calls in the first place
In some countries and, (if not mistaken) states in USA, if an AI is listening to a conversation, both parties must be made aware. If they don't notify the other end, they'll be violating regulations. Privacy erosion and manipulation likelihood aside, this is a terrible idea.
they'll be violating regulations.
sure pops! and they will get a mean fine ;)
Who? Google? Google won't even get slapped on the wrists. I'm talking about the users using this (unwittingly or otherwise, the law doesn't care). Even if they don't care about the privacy implications nor the abuse of the tech, they are opening themselves up for some serious liabilities.
Edit: mistype
on device
scam detection
I know I'll be downvoted into oblivion as I can hardly believe I've formed this opinion myself, but tbh this is a good application for some of this AI tech.
Anecdotally, a friend of mine grew up well-off; from an immigrant family but their parents were educated and in a lucrative profession so he always went to private schools etc. Fast forward to about 10 years after all the kids moved out; the parents had divorced amicably and his mom had a sizeable retirement along with the payout she had from the divorce. In the 7 figures - she never had to worry about money.
Anywho, mom ran into some medical issues so the kids had to get involved with her finances again, as she couldn't do it herself. Turns out that over the course of months or years, mom had been getting scammed to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars at a time, to the point where she had actually taken out a mortgage on the home she previously owned outright. They're still sorting things out but the number he has tossed out in the past is ~$1.4M that got wired overseas and is just... gone now.
So yes, I probably won't turn this feature on myself, but for the tens of millions of uneducated and inept people out there, this could genuinely make a difference in avoiding some catastrophic outcomes. It certainly isn't a perfect solution, but I suspect my friend would rate it as much better than nothing, and I would argue that this falls short of being "strictly evil".
I took my dad for cancer radiation treatment. While in the waiting room, this little old lady came in. I saw her struggling to remove a necklace and offered to help. She had really tangled herself in it trying to get it on (definitely in a "chemo brain" mind fog).
She answered her phone, and I heard a very obvious scam on the other line. I tried telling her, and at first she tried to explain to me that I was wrong, it was some kind helpful people. I took the phone from her and confirmed it was a scam. I told the staff at the clinic but that was about all I figured I could do.
This Ai maybe could have helped. Maybe.
Chemo and alzheimer patients and their families are targets for that reason. Privacy was already a joke before DOGE copied it all off for Elmos Next Reich
Yeah Google claims it's not recording, storing or being sent the conversations or sharing them with anyone, and that this is all done 'on-device'.
The thing is, I don't trust them. At all.
Maybe the terms and conditions will silently change. Maybe their definitions of "recording" and "save" will change. Maybe they're blatantly lying and are willing to pay a fine if they get caught.
Google's whole business model is harvesting and selling people's data, so I have to assume the worst intentions.
Híjole
Deciding to install GrapheneOS is constantly validated for me! But I never want to give Google money ever again.
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)_/¯
That's fine. I'm just not going to enable it.
Not enabling it may prevent you from accessing the user-facing features but may not actually prevent it from recording your conversation and training on it.
According to Google it only operates on device. If I didn't trust Google with claims like that, I wouldn't be using Android.
I'm just not going to ~~enable~~ disable it.
The article claims that 1 trillion dollars was lost to scams in 2024 “based on research from GASA.org”. I cannot for the life of me figure out where this number comes from. Going to that website they say it’s based on ~58,000 surveys. I think they took the survey results, took the average amount of money the surveys claimed people lost and multiplied it by the total population of Earth or some nonsense shit. Their reports are blocked behind registration, which I’m not willing to do to find out their report is bullshit. Misinformation at its finest right here.
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".
Yup... Time to go back to graphene OS. Just been lazy about putting it on this phone.
Reading this from GOS. Tapping freedom. Installation doesn't take more than 10 mins!
Same
No, no, Fuck You, no!!
I will have no phone that employs "Counterfeit Conciousness" to listen to every fucking word of every fucking conversation leading to (among others):
Fuck right off with this.
This solidifies for me I will never own a Pixel phone.
And, if this becomes ubiquitous in Android, I'll have to rethink that, too.
Doesn't mean I'll necessarily go to iOS; more likely completely rethink having a phone at all.
Fuck Google entirely. Don't be Evil my ass.
🙄 🤡 🖕 🖕
Since it's processed on device they don't (necessarily) need to transmit and store your conversations in some central location. I guess theoretically this could be done in a secure way.
Fuck Android. Run Calyx or Graphene. it's not difficult for any PC enthusiast.
unfortunately both of those have a very small list of supported devices.
This ☝️, which nobody tells you, and then about 20 other things nobody tells you except that one Indian vlogger who installs everything on everything.
TL;DW - if you have a relatively recent Pixel, you’re probably good. Everything else, get out the forum posts, an old POS windows box you don’t mind trashing and start finding out what doesn’t work. You might get some Samsung to mostly work ok.
Which include pixels
yeah, it's all about individual priorities
I mean, I would own a pixel phone.... with linux on it....
Additionally, just fucking stop scammers from using fucking gift cards.
Surely it's not that hard to detect that a gift card sold in Australia is being activated in Russia.
The gift card people have absolutely no motivation to fix this problem. They are making bank.
WTF. What could possibly go wrong. Flip phone here I come.
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.
