this post was submitted on 16 May 2025
434 points (98.9% liked)

Technology

70550 readers
3907 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related news or articles.
  3. Be excellent to each other!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
  10. Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots


founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

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.

(page 2) 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago

I had to go into Protection and Safety within the Messages setting, and then Spam Protection was in there.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 weeks ago

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?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago
[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago

More AI testing...

[–] Showroom7561 2 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

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?".

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

With nobody to reign them in, they do all kinds of cool stuff

And they never ever ask themselves "Is this ethically the right thing to do". And so they create things that do way more harm for society than good. For selfish reasons, just because it is a "fun" project. And I'm sure management figures they will profit one way or another the more they control everything thru their AIs they shove on people.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

I may be biased (PhD student here) but I don't fault them for being as such. Ethics is something that 1) requires formal training 2) requires oversight 3) contains to are different to every person. Quite frankly, it's not part of their training, never been emphasized as part of their training, and subjective based on cultural experiences.

What is considered unreasonable risk of harm is going to be different to everybody. To me, if the entire design runs locally and does not collect data for Google's use then it's perfectly ethical. That being said, this does not prevent someone else from adding the data collection features. I think the original design of such a system should put in a reasonable amount of effort in stopping that. But if that is done then there's nothing else to blame them about. The moral responsibility lies with the one who pulled the trigger.

Should the original designer have anticipated this issue thus never took the first step? Maybe. But that depends on a lot of circumstance that we don't know so it's hard to predict anything meaningful.

As for the more "harm than good" analysis, I absolutely detest that sort of reasoning since it attempts to quantify social utility in a pure mathematical sense. If this reasoning holds, an extreme example would be justifying harm to any minority group as long as it maximizes benefit for society. Basically Omelas. I believe a good quantitative reasoning would be checking if harm is introduced to ANY group of people, as long as that's the case the whole is considered unethical.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

All things are going into an authoritarian direction which needs control of the opposition.

Now that we don't have a real president anymore Google started including white house announcements in Google News. I know every one of these is written by an idiot who is not qualified for their job so I turned them off. But why the fuck didn't they do this back when we actually had a real president and these announcements were legitimate newsworthy information? The announcements of a real president were never considered newsworthy information but the babblings of a traitorapist with the mind of a 13 year old are? Fuck you google!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago

They get a new feature to boast about

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (4 children)

Americans still actively use telephony services?

I just don't use the Phone and SMS apps. Haven't for years. It's old tech that's only used by bots and scammers.

Get with the times. Just block them. You're basically putting an ad blocker on.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 weeks ago

What you use? Signal?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago

I'm not American, but my country has largely moved off phone and SMS but we still get spam messages on WhatsApp and Telegram. The spam and scam will chase you wherever you go, if they haven't, it just means those platforms aren't popular enough in your region for them to switch to.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago

Unfortunately my 70 year old neighbor is tech illiterate so they only know how to call and answer calls on the smartphone they got given by the phone service they use. Also some places i order food from have such shit online ordering or whats essentialy a test app for their app that phone calls are just so fucking easier. Heck official apps for chains dont let you log in if you have a vpn since they still go through your browser app and im NOT letting my browser through clean to order shite so again, calling works just fine.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago

I have graphing OS. I still get a ton of spam phone calls a day.

I'm apparently not enough of a software developer to figure out how to use SpamBlocker app. Anybody have any suggestions?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago

I had a pixel 5 for 4 years and this wasn't my personal experience.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago

That really doesn't make any sense at all

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

That's fine. I'm just not going to enable it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago

I'm just not going to ~~enable~~ disable it.

load more comments (2 replies)
load more comments
view more: ‹ prev next ›