- cross-posted to:
- privacy@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- privacy@lemmy.ml
Google’s AI model will potentially listen in on all your phone calls — or at least ones it suspects are coming from a fraudster.
To protect the user’s privacy, the company says Gemini Nano operates locally, without connecting to the internet. “This protection all happens on-device, so your conversation stays private to you. We’ll share more about this opt-in feature later this year,” the company says.
“This is incredibly dangerous,” says Meredith Whittaker, the president of a foundation for the end-to-end encrypted messaging app Signal.
Whittaker —a former Google employee— argues that the entire premise of the anti-scam call feature poses a potential threat. That’s because Google could potentially program the same technology to scan for other keywords, like asking for access to abortion services.
“It lays the path for centralized, device-level client-side scanning,” she said in a post on Twitter/X. “From detecting ‘scams’ it’s a short step to ‘detecting patterns commonly associated w/ seeking reproductive care’ or ‘commonly associated w/ providing LGBTQ resources’ or ‘commonly associated with tech worker whistleblowing.’”
I feel like this would require cooperation from the manufacturer, as Google doesn’t actually provide the Phone app (except when they are the manufacturer).
They might be taking about Google Fi.
except that it does. some OEMs like Samsung serve their own (or at least Samsung used to; not sure if it’s still true), but it’s definitely available on non-Google-branded phones.
It’s available on all phones, but they all have their own version, forked from long ago. Even the standard AOSP Phone app has long split from Google (who have ceased open source development of the app).
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But downloading an app won’t install it as a system app.