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Google’s ‘Secret’ Update Scans All Your Photos
(www.forbes.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
To quote the most salient post
Which is a sorely needed feature to tackle problems like SMS scams
Why do you need machine learning for detecting scams?
Is someone in 2025 trying to help you out of the goodness of their heart? No. Move on.
Blaming the victim solves nothing.
Scamming is a rapidly growing industry that is becoming more professional and specialized all the time. Anyone can be scammed.
if the cellular carriers were forced to verify that caller-ID (or SMS equivalent) was accurate SMS scams would disappear (or at least be weaker). Google shouldn't have to do the job of the carriers, and if they wanted to implement this anyway they should let the user choose what service they want to perform the task similar to how they let the user choose which "Android system WebView" should be used.
No, that wouldn't make much difference. I don't think I've seen a real world attack via SMS that even bothered to "forge" the from-field. People are used to getting texts from unknown numbers.
And how would you possibly implement this supposed "caller-id" for a field that doesn't even have to be set to a number?
caller id is the thing that tells you the number. it isn't cheap to forge, but it's the only way a scan could reasonably effect anyone with more than half a brain. there is never a reason to send information to an unknown SMS number, or click on a link from a text message from an unknown number.
You don't need advanced scanning technology running on every device with access to every single bit of data you ever seen to detect scam. You need telco operator to stop forwarding forged messages headers and… that's it. Cheap, efficient, zero risk related to invasion of privacy through a piece of software you did not need but was put there "for your own good".
I will perhaps be nitpicking, but... not exactly, not always. People get their shit hacked all the time due to poor practices. And then those hacked things can send emails and texts and other spam all they want, and it'll not be forged headers, so you still need spam filtering.