Per one tech forum this week: “Google has quietly installed an app on all Android devices called ‘Android System SafetyCore’. It claims to be a ‘security’ application, but whilst running in the background, it collects call logs, contacts, location, your microphone, and much more making this application ‘spyware’ and a HUGE privacy concern. It is strongly advised to uninstall this program if you can. To do this, navigate to 'Settings’ > 'Apps’, then delete the application.”
Google says that SafetyCore “provides on-device infrastructure for securely and privately performing classification to help users detect unwanted content. Users control SafetyCore, and SafetyCore only classifies specific content when an app requests it through an optionally enabled feature.”
GrapheneOS — an Android security developer — provides some comfort, that SafetyCore “doesn’t provide client-side scanning used to report things to Google or anyone else. It provides on-device machine learning models usable by applications to classify content as being spam, scams, malware, etc. This allows apps to check content locally without sharing it with a service and mark it with warnings for users.”
But GrapheneOS also points out that “it’s unfortunate that it’s not open source and released as part of the Android Open Source Project and the models also aren’t open let alone open source… We’d have no problem with having local neural network features for users, but they’d have to be open source.” Which gets to transparency again.
DuskyRo@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
SafetyCore Placeholder so if it ever tries to reinstall itself it will fail due to signature mismatch.
moncharleskey@lemmy.zip 5 weeks ago
I struggle with GitHub sometimes. It says to download the apk but I don’t see it in the file list. Anyone care to point me in the right direction?
fushuan@lemm.ee 4 weeks ago
There’s an app called obtainium that let’s you link the main page of github apps and manages both the download, the instalation and the updates of those apps.
Great if you want the latest software directly from the source.
dafta@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 weeks ago
Scroll down to releases.
Smc87@lemmy.sdf.org 4 weeks ago
github.com/daboynb/…/Safetycore-placeholder.apk
wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 weeks ago
Under the end of the readme, the section labelled releases.
rocci@lemmy.ml 5 weeks ago
At the bottom of the page, it says releases - click on the release that’s there, and that’s where you’ll find the all.
I haven’t been able to install it though due to signature mismatch, I’m not sure why…
thisistricky@lemm.ee 4 weeks ago
Click on the “releases” link
AnExerciseInFalling@programming.dev 4 weeks ago
Wow that’s actually genius thank you
v4ld1z@lemmy.zip 4 weeks ago
Amazing, thank you. I have uninstalled this bs twice now and have so far been spared by another force install. I hope this works
kertain@sh.itjust.works 4 weeks ago
Thank you for sharing!
K4mpfie@feddit.org 4 weeks ago
And what exactly does the github App do?
Is suppose it’s not the same as the Google App?
ziggurat@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
It doesn’t do anything. The only reason to consider installing it is that this is cryptographically signed by another developer, so if Google tries to install safety core again, it will fail because googled signature is different. It also has a super high version number, so that Google hopefully will not think to try to install the software.