Google promised to keep data from the phone calls private.
Prevent 100% of crime by having a police officer in your home 24/7.
Google has an idea to prevent phone scams, but it'll mean allowing its AI to listen in on your calls
Submitted 6 months ago by solo@kbin.earth to aboringdystopia@lemmy.world
https://www.businessinsider.com/google-ai-gemini-nano-listens-phone-calls-detect-scams-2024-5
Comments
Hobbes_Dent@lemmy.world 6 months ago
EasternLettuce@lemm.ee 6 months ago
Police officers do not prevent crime
Rhaedas@fedia.io 6 months ago
Google promised
You mean the company that got rid of their previous motto of "do no evil"?
Lucidlethargy@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
Google already prevents 100% of the scams on my phone without doing this. I haven’t had any spam or scam calls in years.
dev_null@lemmy.ml 6 months ago
It is truly a boring dystopia when we need AI to help protect ourselves against scammers. At least the overhyped buzzword found one application positive for humanity.
efstajas@lemmy.world 6 months ago
God, everyone, read the article, please. The feature in question uses an on-device AI model, meaning none of the audio or transcript leaves the phone. If Google wanted to secretly record and steal your phone transcripts they could do so already. They wouldn’t need this feature.
unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de 6 months ago
Im sorry but are you high or something? You clearly understand enough about computers to know what those words mean, but you didnt even consider that google phones can do whatever they want with data thats “on-device”. Every device with google services has a root backdoor. Ofcourse they will gather all that data, because why wouldnt they? They can also gather it on demand, because it will surely get logged on-device and can be extracted at any time.
Also even if they wouldnt collect the data, its a fucking horrible idea in the first place. Sure lets outsource trust in our communications to some shitty machine learning algorithm that is dumber than a fucking toddler.
efstajas@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Before I get deeper into this argument, the main point I was trying to make is that people are clearly assuming based on the headline that the transcript analysis happens in the cloud, and aren’t aware of them at least claiming that it’s fully on-device. If Google wants to steal phone transcripts, they can do this already, this feature doesn’t change anything about it.
Other than this… I know that people especially here are super wary of google and their privacy-related claims for very good reason. I am too. I know this is a very sensitive topic. But realistically, for this particular discussion…
“Ofcourse they will gather all that data, because why wouldnt they?”
There are so, SO many reasons why a massive company like Google, especially one that is constantly under scrutiny for their privacy practices, wouldn’t secretly record / analyze / store / whatever private phone conversations and tbh most probably just aren’t. There is immense regulation around this topic in practically all markets they operate in. If Google was found straight up sending transcripts of phone conversations to their servers without very explicit consent (aka more than some clause in ToS somewhere) it’d realistically be the biggest scandal in Google’s history, and likely significantly hurt, if not kill, at least their phone division. In many markets just the recording of phone conversations is already illegal, and Google can’t just do it anyway based on some ToS clauses — it’s just illegal.
I’m not trying to say that I don’t believe they do this because they’re good people or anything, but because from a pure business standpoint it’d be immensely risky for gathering data that is also hardly usable in practice due to how sensitive it is. The circle of people that would even be allowed to know of its existence internally would have to be tiny and extremely trusted to prevent leaks.
The truth is that they can amass so much data through other potentially dubious yet totally legal ways already, so an immense and illegal overstep of privacy convention like this is just unnecessary.
EnderMB@lemmy.world 6 months ago
While I do agree with the premise of your comment, most countries (including the US) have strict and long-standing laws on recording phone conversations. Even if Google wanted to do this, I can see it being an absolute nightmare to egress data from a device onto external storage.
dev_null@lemmy.ml 6 months ago
Sure lets outsource trust in our communications to some shitty machine learning algorithm that is dumber than a fucking toddler.
And it really doesn’t need to be smarter than that, to show a “banks will never asks you to transfer money to another account, this is likely a scam” dialog when the speaker claiming to be from your bank tells you to do so. This will save lots of vulnerable and older people from getting scammed. If you think that’s a horrible idea then I’m interested in your reasoning. Over $10 billion per year is lost to scams, making a dent in that is amazing.
solo@kbin.earth 6 months ago
Of course they will gather all that data, because why wouldnt they?
But they promised...
KuroiKaze@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Actually from what I’ve seen Google has moved hard towards reducing gathered data and encouraging play store apps to use less permissions and data.
Rekonok@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
Google promised I lol’d
gedaliyah@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Don’t worry everyone, I’m sure all the voice data will be anonymized.
WhyDoYouPersist@lemmy.world 6 months ago
What a coincidence!
schwim@lemm.ee 6 months ago
Given the rarity in which I use my phone as a phone, they can knock themselves out with the bot call hangups that make up almost 100% of my call logs.
Volkditty@lemmy.world 6 months ago
I already have a system where, if someone calls me, it’s probably a scam.
Bluefruit@lemmy.world 6 months ago
If they leave a voicemail then its more legit but yea same here. I’d rather not have my phone calls be used as AI training.