this post was submitted on 23 Apr 2025
118 points (99.2% liked)
privacy
4051 readers
1 users here now
Big tech and governments are monitoring and recording your eating activities. c/Privacy provides tips and tricks to protect your privacy against global surveillance.
Partners:
- community.nicfab.it/c/privacy
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
On one hand, this is a huge grey zone in terms of privacy. But on the other hand, it's also a huge win for anybody who has had to endure unsolicited dick pics. I used to work with a woman who had a stalker that would send her "tribute" photos from spoofed numbers to appear as people in her contact list; this feature wouldn't have completely blocked the messages, but would have at least mitigated some of the trauma she went through.
Then it should be at the phone level. Setting of: blur photos from unknown contacts.
All this google function has done is get parents in trouble with the law and closed google accounts when telehealth doctors have asked for pictures of their kids rashes for diagnosis
I know the story you're referring to, that's something different. That was a cloud-based storage scanning, this appears to be running entirely locally on the user's device.
Imo, it's a better solution, but still not perfect, and not immune to abuse.
Yeah facebooks WhatsApp was doing local phone scanning of content and then reporting back to the mothership. Its under the guise of protecting kids from abuse, but it can also be nefarious if Facebook is pressured by the government to also include a scan of anti administration talk, or a person search. Just too Orwellian in my opinion
Clearly this is why Google is adding this feature