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.
🙄 🤡 🖕 🖕
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
Bro what’s wrong with GrapheneOS?
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
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.
edit: so the “phone shit is permanent” crew came out early on this one? Bruh, your phone can be taken from you in an instant. It’s transient.
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.
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.
Counterfeit consciousness
I like that
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
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.
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 :-)
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.
Jokes on them. I don’t have phone conversations
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.
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.
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 listeningin 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
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”.
More AI testing…
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.
