Google's AI now listens to your English language phone conversations

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.

🙄 🤡 🖕 🖕

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".

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

Jokes on them. I don't have phone conversations

Yup... Time to go back to graphene OS. Just been lazy about putting it on this phone.

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.

So, wait, Google can record calls, but we can't?

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.

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).

Great, more AI bloat from Google that is now listening in on my calls? How do I disable?

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.

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.

WTF. What could possibly go wrong. Flip phone here I come.

Ah, but what if I use a British accent? Got em

Deciding to install GrapheneOS is constantly validated for me! But I never want to give Google money ever again.

Give me call screening and filtering options so we can ignore the calls in the first place

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?

Dumb as I am, I have a Pixel... the good thing though? Graphene OS is an option.

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?".

In some countries and, (if not mistaken) states in USA, if an AI is listening to a conversation, both parties must be made aware. If they don't notify the other end, they'll be violating regulations. Privacy erosion and manipulation likelihood aside, this is a terrible idea.

More AI testing...

If enabled, Scam Detection will beep at the start and during the call to notify participants the feature is on. You can turn off Scam Detection at any time, during an individual call or for all future calls.

Scammers will quickly catch on then the real trick will be to just play that beep without any of the ai stuff.

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?

And? Google’s been listening to you for years and not only in english.

This isn't really anything new. https://signal.org/

Híjole

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

More than half of Americans reported receiving at least one scam call per day in 2024.

Bullshit.

is this really official? seems like a fake site

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!

If people need to be warned that they might be scammed by someone with an Indian voice asking them for gift cards, I think that they should be reclassified as AI mounts instead of people at that point.

People do become more senile as they get older, but they need to recognize it as well as prepare ahead of it in time. Who knows, maybe being an AI pet mount then wouldn't be so bad, as long as it was with an offline localized LLM-like AI vetted openly and widely, not the transparent excuse for abuse this is.