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):
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.
🙄 🤡 🖕 🖕
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.
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.
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".
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.
They could also spy on you without providing this feature at all. I get not trusting Google, and you shouldn't be using a Google Pixel in that case. But in the event that you are using a Google Pixel, this optional feature is only a positive. If Pixels spy on you, then they are doing it with this or without it.
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
I agree this feature should be 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.
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.
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."
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 endpoints~~ phones 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.
As is stated, the call is processed locally in the user's device. If that holds true, there is no recording and no third party processing going on. Your point does not make sense.
The person owning the phone where the processing takes place, is the processor of the data in this case. That still requires consent from the data subject per gdpr.
No, that's ridiculous.
This Regulation does not apply to the processing of personal data: [...] (c) by a natural person in the course of a purely personal or household activity;
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!
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!
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.
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.
Most people here: Yes, I bought an advertiser’s device, hooked up in a million ways to that advertiser’s services, who’s well known for monitoring every aspect of the life of every person they can, but how dare they monitor this part?
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)_/¯
Dumb as I am, I have a Pixel... the good thing though? Graphene OS is an option.
Last I checked it's only an option on non Verizon pixels or has Verizon stopped fucking things over.
...is this some sort of joke my Nordic brain can't understand? I need to go hug a councilman.
Great, more AI bloat from Google that is now listening in on my calls? How do I disable?
And? Google’s been listening to you for years and not only in english.
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
I had a pixel 5 for 4 years and this wasn't my personal experience.
More AI testing...
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.
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
