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.
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.
🙄 🤡 🖕 🖕
I mean, I would own a pixel phone… with linux on it…
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
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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”.
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.
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
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
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.
Yeah I just about had a meltdown trying to disable all the AI collection that Samsung phones come with nowadays. Phones are more like data harvesting engines than devices of utility. It’s gotten so much worse over the past 5 years. I mean it was never good but it’s making the internet nearly unusable if you want any kind of privacy.
Completely agree about watching the privacy destruction ramp up significantly in recent years. The one silver lining is that deciding how much and what to allow for myself and my children is just a lot easier, and even in less abusive scenarios, less smartphone use is good for basically all of us.
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).
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.
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.
Great, more AI bloat from Google that is now listening in on my calls? How do I disable?
Disable? No. But call everyone and everything cunts to poison the AI? Works for me.
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.
Ah, but what if I use a British accent? Got em
WTF. What could possibly go wrong. Flip phone here I come.
Give me call screening and filtering options so we can ignore the calls in the first place
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?
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.
I had to go into Protection and Safety within the Messages setting, and then Spam Protection was in there.
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.
We use AI models processed on-device
If it’s opt-in, and the processing is done on-device, then I have no reason to be outraged.
But the skeptic in me asks “what’s in it for google?”.
This is common for companies that like to hire PhDs.
PhDs like to work on interesting and challenging projects.
With nobody to reign them in, they do all kinds of cool stuff that makes no money (e.g. Intel Optane and transactional memory).
Designing a realtime scam analysis tool with resource constraints is interesting enough to be greenlit but makes no money.
Once released, they’ll move on to the next big challenge, and when nobody is there to maintain their work, it will be silently dropped by Google.
I’m willing to bet more than 70% of the Google graveyard comes from projects like these.
With nobody to reign them in, they do all kinds of cool stuff
And they never ever ask themselves “Is this ethically the right thing to do”. And so they create things that do way more harm for society than good. For selfish reasons, just because it is a “fun” project. And I’m sure management figures they will profit one way or another the more they control everything thru their AIs they shove on people.
I may be biased (PhD student here) but I don’t fault them for being as such. Ethics is something that 1) requires formal training 2) requires oversight 3) contains to are different to every person. Quite frankly, it’s not part of their training, never been emphasized as part of their training, and subjective based on cultural experiences.
What is considered unreasonable risk of harm is going to be different to everybody. To me, if the entire design runs locally and does not collect data for Google’s use then it’s perfectly ethical. That being said, this does not prevent someone else from adding the data collection features. I think the original design of such a system should put in a reasonable amount of effort in stopping that. But if that is done then there’s nothing else to blame them about. The moral responsibility lies with the one who pulled the trigger.
Should the original designer have anticipated this issue thus never took the first step? Maybe. But that depends on a lot of circumstance that we don’t know so it’s hard to predict anything meaningful.
As for the more “harm than good” analysis, I absolutely detest that sort of reasoning since it attempts to quantify social utility in a pure mathematical sense. If this reasoning holds, an extreme example would be justifying harm to any minority group as long as it maximizes benefit for society. Basically Omelas. I believe a good quantitative reasoning would be checking if harm is introduced to ANY group of people, as long as that’s the case the whole is considered unethical.
They get a new feature to boast about
