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.
when i had a pixel5a, i would get multiple scam calls a day without fail, and almost always at the exact same time. with my new non-pixel, non-samsung and non-iphone i dont get as many as before, google is most likely selling your data to the very same scammers. i got a OP12R instead.
That really doesn’t make any sense at all
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Jokes on them. I don’t have phone conversations
and when i do, they’re not in English
Or at least not in conversational English. Me “The cheese is old and moldy.” Wife “Roses eggs” Me “Bach unaccounted.”
haha very cryptic, i love that ^^
In plain English this means
Me “Have you checked for eggs recently? I just saw a bunch in the nesting boxes. Too many for one day.” Wife “Yeah, it’s been a while. Even Rose [the duck], who hasn’t laid an egg in five years, probably laid one.” Me “I haven’t seen our special needs cat, the one we trapped as part of a TNR run on our own property, in the last 12 hours. Have you seen that blessed dumb beast who walks like he is drunk? If you see him now could you bring him inside?”
Any sufficiently developed culture has its own language. In this house we go out of our way to make obtuse inside joke references to keep each other on our toes.
One day you come home, you see all your stuff is in boxes. Then you see a note on the fridge, it says: “Womp womp” You fall to your knees and break down in tears. Through your tears you see another note underneath the fridge. You reach for the note. The note reads: “Womp, womp?” You began to laugh maniacally. You hear footsteps, you stop laughing. Your wife stands behind you. She says: “Kept you on your toes didn’t I?”
Always read the fine print.
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.
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 read that it’s “opt out” not “opt in”.
You need to opt in to the public beta. Once it’s out of beta… Who knows!
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.
get a load of this: those people are allowed to vote. they cant follow a phonecall but feel entitled to make decisions about their country. cant make that up. go water plants with mountain dew!
on device
scam detection
I know I’ll be downvoted into oblivion as I can hardly believe I’ve formed this opinion myself, but tbh this is a good application for some of this AI tech.
Anecdotally, a friend of mine grew up well-off; from an immigrant family but their parents were educated and in a lucrative profession so he always went to private schools etc. Fast forward to about 10 years after all the kids moved out; the parents had divorced amicably and his mom had a sizeable retirement along with the payout she had from the divorce. In the 7 figures - she never had to worry about money.
Anywho, mom ran into some medical issues so the kids had to get involved with her finances again, as she couldn’t do it herself. Turns out that over the course of months or years, mom had been getting scammed to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars at a time, to the point where she had actually taken out a mortgage on the home she previously owned outright. They’re still sorting things out but the number he has tossed out in the past is ~$1.4M that got wired overseas and is just… gone now.
So yes, I probably won’t turn this feature on myself, but for the tens of millions of uneducated and inept people out there, this could genuinely make a difference in avoiding some catastrophic outcomes. It certainly isn’t a perfect solution, but I suspect my friend would rate it as much better than nothing, and I would argue that this falls short of being “strictly evil”.
I agree this feature enabled by default so people tech literate enough can just turn it off would be great for several people I know, just not from Google.
Yeah Google claims it’s not recording, storing or being sent the conversations or sharing them with anyone, and that this is all done ‘on-device’.
The thing is, I don’t trust them. At all.
Maybe the terms and conditions will silently change. Maybe their definitions of “recording” and “save” will change. Maybe they’re blatantly lying and are willing to pay a fine if they get caught.
Google’s whole business model is harvesting and selling people’s data, so I have to assume the worst intentions.
I took my dad for cancer radiation treatment. While in the waiting room, this little old lady came in. I saw her struggling to remove a necklace and offered to help. She had really tangled herself in it trying to get it on (definitely in a “chemo brain” mind fog).
She answered her phone, and I heard a very obvious scam on the other line. I tried telling her, and at first she tried to explain to me that I was wrong, it was some kind helpful people. I took the phone from her and confirmed it was a scam. I told the staff at the clinic but that was about all I figured I could do.
This Ai maybe could have helped. Maybe.
Chemo and alzheimer patients and their families are targets for that reason. Privacy was already a joke before DOGE copied it all off for Elmos Next Reich
My usernote for you contains the phrase “privacy-illiterate”, but this is a good take, assuming data isnt sent back. You’ve been upgraded, lol
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.
🙄 🤡 🖕 🖕
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
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.
Additionally, just fucking stop scammers from using fucking gift cards.
Surely it’s not that hard to detect that a gift card sold in Australia is being activated in Russia.
The gift card people have absolutely no motivation to fix this problem. They are making bank.
They need to be given motivation, through legal obligation.
Obviously.
Counterfeit consciousness
I like that
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.
I mean, I would own a pixel phone… with linux on it…
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.
Ah, but what if I use a British accent? Got em
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)_/¯
Yup… Time to go back to graphene OS. Just been lazy about putting it on this phone.
Reading this from GOS. Tapping freedom. Installation doesn’t take more than 10 mins!
Ugh I know I have it on my old phone. ADHD just being a cunt lately. Makes it hard to life lol
Same
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?
This is scam protection not spam protection. The beta was just introduced and you have to opt-in.
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.
Give me call screening and filtering options so we can ignore the calls in the first place
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.
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.
Like always, google is doing things for free to get training data.
All things are going into an authoritarian direction which needs control of the opposition. Google will have the infrastructure to identify people with opposing mindsets. There won’t be a rebellion if the rebel leaders can be locked up in time.
