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.
That’s fine. I’m just not going to enable it.
I’m just not going to
enabledisable 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.
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. 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
WTF. What could possibly go wrong. Flip phone here I come.
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):
- Further training
- Data retention of complete call content somewhere (waiting to be hacked)
- Possible reports to LEO (or worse)
- …whatever else I can’t think of just now…
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.
🙄 🤡 🖕 🖕
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.
Obviously.
They need to be given motivation, through legal obligation.
I mean, I would own a pixel phone… with linux on it…
We got baited by piece of shit journos
It’s a local model. It doesn’t send data over.
If they want call data they can buy it straight from service providers anyway
We got baited by piece of shit journos
It’s an official announcement written by Google.
Doesn’t mean I’ll necessarily go to iOS; more likely completely rethink having a phone at all.
Man cuts off nose to spite face; news at 11
This solidifies for me I will never own a Pixel phone.
Sounds like a pixel phone is exactly what u want just u want GrapheneOS on it.
Never recc that again, Linux phone or nothing
Linux phones don’t really exist as a practical thing you can replace android with.
Fxtec pro comes loaded with the users choice of android, Ubuntu touch, sailfish or lineage. Choices exist. Though I’ll have to find a bank that has a working app or a good website
Bro what’s wrong with GrapheneOS?
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.
So, it’s on device, which negates many of the above worries. Does that change things? I’m all good with private AI, personally. Slippery slope and all, though…
Pixel is the only device that is supported by GrapheneOS (sadly), so you can own Pixel just for installing grapheneOS on it.
Fuck Android. Run Calyx or Graphene. it’s not difficult for any PC enthusiast.
Can’t back up everything on my phone without root and cant root without wiping the phone so…
How have you managed to save things on your phone you cannot back up without root?
You’re just straight fucked if this is true. Don’t save permanent things to your phone. Your phone is transient. Phones are not permanent.
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.
And next phone same person buys is the latest same pay by installments piece of lock downed shit hardware. And continue to complain on lack of support for shitty hardware, shitty firmware and shitty software. Stop buy shit , custom roms have been around since android 1.1 and GOS and Calyx aren’t recent inventions either.
Lineage official supports a fuckton of devices as well. Including every single pixel made. https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/ So quite well documented.
yeah, it’s all about individual priorities
Which include pixels
Still based on garbage android. Android is just shit pilled on shit.
Linux can’t manage the cellphone blobs yet. I’ll be using linux on a phone when it works well.
Counterfeit consciousness
I like that
Yup… Time to go back to graphene OS. Just been lazy about putting it on this phone.
You should absolutely use GrapheneOS, but why would this optional offline feature sway you to it?
Same
Reading this from GOS. Tapping freedom. Installation doesn’t take more than 10 mins!
Ugh I know I have it on my old phone. ADHD just being a cunt lately. Makes it hard to life lol
Same
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”.
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.
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)_/¯
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.
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 agree this feature enabled by default so people tech literate enough can just turn it off would be great for several people I know, just not from Google.
My usernote for you contains the phrase “privacy-illiterate”, but this is a good take, assuming data isnt sent back. You’ve been upgraded, lol
This AI tech, smat-home, cloud compute etc would all be amazing if we could trust that it wasn’t built to harvest us.
We, the people, have become the Commons.
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.
They could also spy on you without providing this feature at all. I get not trusting Google, and you shouldn’t be using a Google Pixel in that case. But in the event that you are using a Google Pixel, this optional feature is only a positive. If Pixels spy on you, then they are doing it with this or without it.
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
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.
When the phone is answered the AI is the one speaking and tells the person calling that it’s a bot who’ll pass the info to the actual user
That’s not the same as recording the call. Once the call is transferred, it is expected for the bot to stop listening, unless it state that it’s part of the call (which it doesn’t).
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
Híjole
Give me call screening and filtering options so we can ignore the calls in the first place
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?
Unfortunately my 70 year old neighbor is tech illiterate so they only know how to call and answer calls on the smartphone they got given by the phone service they use. Also some places i order food from have such shit online ordering or whats essentialy a test app for their app that phone calls are just so fucking easier. Heck official apps for chains dont let you log in if you have a vpn since they still go through your browser app and im NOT letting my browser through clean to order shite so again, calling works just fine.
I’m not American, but my country has largely moved off phone and SMS but we still get spam messages on WhatsApp and Telegram. The spam and scam will chase you wherever you go, if they haven’t, it just means those platforms aren’t popular enough in your region for them to switch to.
Yes. Still common in US.
Ah, but what if I use a British accent? Got em
