Aren’t viruses and spyware illegal?
Technically it’s neither. Viruses spread and spyware sends your data to an attacker. This app does neither. The third party feature however does make it easier for spyware to identify sensitive content on your phone, but then you have a problem anyway because you gave a spyware app access to all your media.
If you are rich and powerful, everything you do becomes legal. Because rich and powerful people are all trustworthy and would never do something for only their own interests.
what the fuck? I had no idea about this. I never opted into this.
No shit. The billionaires at the top worry about public safety, would you believe it? (giant fucking sarcasm tag goes here for all my asperger ftiends)
Who owns the (fully paid up) phone that’s in my hands right now? I try to tell myself I do, but…
Yea, I am not a happy camper.
If we weren’t so fucking weak and unorganized, we’d be burning their companies and their homes to the fucking ground.
You can uninstall it and install this so that Google can’t get it back on your system.
Won’t install for me
Uninstall the existing app first
I once stumbled upon this app automatically installed on the phone I happen to have paid for (because at this point I doubt I could call this piece of metallic tile “my phone” and suing Google Inc. for them to refund me this phone would be as successful as if I tried to push and move a certain Mountain View building from its place with my own muscles). Shortly after that, it seems to have vanished from the list of apps as mysteriously as it initially appeared, either it uninstalled itself or it was changed names.
In any case, as soon as I realized that presence and realized I wouldn’t have an “uninstall” option without turning on options that would straightforwardly break banking apps and government apps (gov.br the Brazilian app for everything citizen-related) I was compelled to use, I started filling the phone’s gallery with all sorts of potentially-triggering stuff I either find online or (mainly) make myself: dark art including FNAF-like jump scares, haunted/cursed artifacts and occult/ritualistic imagery, photos and videos depicting snakes and scorpions, lots of Memento Mori including photos of cemeteries and tombstones, archaeological skeletons, buzzards eating animal carcasses in the wilderness, as well as media of my own cut wr… I mean, uhm, media of my own cute wrathful owl I sculpted on Blender. Yeah, several different 3d rendered scenes and short animation videos as well, especially scenes in which she’s performing chases and huntings… Not to mention the plethora of owl photos and videos, many of which are birdwatching of them catching and eating prey on nature, in potentially gory settings (i.e. the unfiltered, untamed nature who doesn’t care about our anthropocentric definitions of good and evil).
So if Google decides to start “protecting me from (my own) sensitive imagery”, their clanker is essentially going to have a hard time having to go through gibibytes of media and potentially wiping the whole device as I made sure to fill the entire storage (even non-media things too, such as using provoking nicknames for fictional contacts like a contact card for “Inanna”, as well as odd descriptions for bank transactions such as “my soul belongs to Ereshkigal”) with purposefully sensitive content. If they do that, I’ll then have something more concrete to sue them for: religious intolerance, as it’s all representing of my left-hand path spirituality.
And with all this I leave this one absurdist idea on how to try and boycott the corporate nanny (and surveillance). A phone gallery full of sensitive items (not nudes, but dark/provocative art purposefully built to trigger similar nannying responses) will hopefully overwhelm their servers, shall they offload the computing to their data centers. If this doesn’t overwhelm their servers, at least the techbros and their clankers are going to have an interesting time when scrolling through legal-yet-disturbing content they hoarded from Android users’ phones.
Came for technology news, stayed for the Mesopotamian undergods.
So…
- They really don’t care about that stuff
- They are using your own phone’s processing power to scan, not theirs. I’m sure they have a phone-home mechanism, but they have no vested interest in scanning server-side when they can do it phone-side.
As I said to borari, when stuff involves lots (GiBs) of nonindexed files (my private art) and a smartphone whose hardware can barely make a distilled Llama/Gemma to spit out a “The sum of the squares of the sides is the square of the hypotenuse” (yes, I did try local LLMs so I’m aware of my hardware limits), they would have no choice other than phone home, and thus carrying haunting voices through the ongoing call.
Also, they have some inner desire to hoard people’s data for training their clanker. Except the data can (and will) be poisoned, thus poisoning the well.
I appreciate the spirit of reistance, also +1 for the left hand path, however, the broader society needs a more solid solution to these privacy-invading and covertly installing apps. I get it you’re doing the best you know how. I am in the same boat. But we need something more solid for the long term.
It’s not looking for stuff like you’re describing, skeletons, graves, birds, whatever spoopy “dark” stuff you put on there. It’s looking for nude people, then actioning/alerting if it thinks minors are in the images. You definitely don’t want to honeypot this ai bro.
That’s the thing: they’re looking for something, and in order to look for something, they must look, and lots of computation (AI inference) must happen, especially when it involves nonindexed files (my own private art, from digital drawings and handmade sketches, going through photos of my own ritualistic installations, all the way to Blender 3D renders and animations, all of which is yet to be crawled). And if this involves gibibytes of data, on a smartphone whose hardware can barely run 1B parameter clankers locally without hiccuping, I can see my private files going to Google’s servers for “efficient inference”, files of which will likely end up seen by (and sowing some interesting inspirations for nightmares in the subconsciousnesses of) Google’s employees during server maintenance/audits or, mainly, end up training their clanker.
As for the latter, hopefully Google Gemini would end up “seeing” enough of my digitized psyche to randomly start silly infodumpings about, for example, different owl taxonomies and their diets down to the very gory microdetails about how owls make a tasty dinner out of mice, and/or the different interpretations by historians and archaeologists regarding the figure (Ereshkigal or Lilith) depicted in the Burney Relief, a Mesopotamic plaque of which, by the way, is part of the phone’s gallery too (including my own artistic works inspired on it) and seemingly an efficient trigger for nudity detection algorithms, which will likely put the rest of the gallery under automated scrutiny (because there was a positive, albeit a false one) and, thus, serving as the semantic Trojan Horse for my dark artistic private content to make its way to their servers.
I mean, how else Google Gemini would’ve taken the “inspiration” to suddenly start telling people to “eat rocks” and “add glue to pizza”? Its training data is crowdsourced so there’s nothing much Google can do to avoid sources poisoning the well (and I must nod at the Nephentes algorithm which I praise as way more efficient than Anubis to hurt the western AI corps) other than:
- Adding said poisoned sources to their
.gitignoreequivalent if they know they’ll likely find poison they don’t want messing up with their expensive AI training. - Doing manual curation of people’s personal files, which is time-consuming and potentially unfeasible when dealing with billions of phones.
- Trying to improve the detection algorithms to avoid poisoned sources (which requires training data, which requires them to rely on potentially poisoned sources, which defeats the whole purpose of improving the algorithms in the first place).
- Stopping to put everything else into scrutiny when the detection algorithms stumble upon (potentially false) positives, risking false negatives, which will likely attract some heat from regulatory agencies worldwide and fines for failing to comply with things such as age checking laws (and there it goes the GOOG stocks, together with the entirety of NASDAQ, like a Titanic as investors realize they’re paying for fines not theirs; be it GOOG or other stock, the popping of the ongoing AI bubble will inevitably be something in this regard, Western corporations having their clankers failing on them).
At best, this will consume some portion of Google’s resources (including but not limited to human resources), albeit as infinitesimal as my silly existence can get to a worldwide corporation, but it’s still something I guess…
- Adding said poisoned sources to their
Time to start shooting nudes on film I guess.
You can develop black and white film at home using coffee. Developing nudes this way sounds kinda hot.
I can see a promising market for ‘dumb’ point-and-shoot digital cameras reemerging.
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Doesn’t automatically upload your pictures to train AI on, no internet-based privacy risks whatsoever
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No AI nanny telling you that your pictures are too naughty
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Never needs updates, can never be enshittified by new updates
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No risk of the government getting their hands on your pictures, unless they physically confiscate the device
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Can never be hacked without physical access to the camera
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Doesn’t listen to you or watch you or otherwise spy on you
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Most models have easy to change user-replaceable batteries
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Most models are compatible with SD cards for easily upgradeable storage
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Can take advantage of a larger lens and more adjustable focus/zoom to take better pictures (Even a relatively cheap digital camera could potentially take better pictures than the ultimate flagship phones that cost 4-figures.)
It has already reemerged as part of the retro trend among young people.
I still use my Canon SD1000. 20 years and it’s still going! The resolution is lower (only 7.1MP), but the photos still look really nice. And that was a relatively cheap camera for the time.
Or you could use an open camera app
For now. Until Google says those apps aren’t “verified” or whatever and blacklists them. Until the next Android update makes it scan and upload every photo file anywhere on the device, not just ones used or made in particular apps.
We should consider divorcing Goggle from Android via something like GrapheneOS or /e/OS.
Yeah, I can tell that since I do tests for Amazon (Amazon Vine).
There is more and more camera being put to test, ranging for cheap bellow €100 ones to miniaturized keyring sized ones (with tiny screens).
I tested some of them (and have another one coming next week), the quality of the pictures are good, but the build quality of sub-100 ones are kinda bad (cheap plastics, no optic zoom, no hardpoints for better lenses, sd cards smaller than their advertised size)And that market will destroy itself because “investors” want MRR and so you’ll have to plug your camera into your computer so proprietary software can send the images to the cloud to get “processed” so you can actually view them. You’ll be thankful for the opportunity to pay $9.99USD for that.
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Sphynx cats trigger it and you get an unwarranted alert that Google is very disappointed.
Reportedly, the app uses an on-device machine learning model to classify the content.
Using your shiny new phone to train AI…
For now its only supposed to check Google Messages, so not if you use a different text app.
But one vulnerability already is side loaded versions with super high version numbers so they won’t be auto updated. Those will scan everything and do whatever with it. Considering the apps point is to scan for nudes, likely sending all your nudes to the hacker.
Reportedly, the app uses an on-device machine learning model to classify the content.
Using your shiny new phone to train AI…
I would think the models are already trained, and then deployed to phones to do on-device inference. The models should be fixed and static by the time they end up on a phone (in large part because phone hardware is just not technically suitable for training, whether pre training or post training).
For now its only supposed to check Google Messages, so not if you use a different text app.
Shameless plug for Textra as a much, much better alternative.
No RCS (not their fault, but still).
The dummy version is an empty app.
This is why I’m not buying a new phone until my current one literally breaks down. It’s in the hardware nowadays.
I’ve got a Pixel 9 I keep for development and uninstalled that system app a few months ago. It’s still gone. Maybe updates are reinstalling it but saying that it cannot be uninstalled or removed is a lie.
It says in the article title that it keeps reinstalling itself, not that it can’t be removed.
I removed it using Canta early on when I got my Pixel 9 and it hasn’t ever reinstalled itself in the year or so since I removed it.
Where’s the “android is more free than iOS” people now‽
Edit: Still salty I see (from the downvotes).
Have you considered that the down votes are because your comment adds nothing to the discussion except ragebait?
Nope!
Read the article
Now Apple devices use a similar nudity-blur system called Communication Safety – it uses on-device machine learning to analyze potentially unsafe photo and video attachments and is enabled by default.
Apple has the exact same tech
Yes, but the android people are annoyed because they can’t remove it from their precious customizable OS.
Edit: there they are.
Please go back to reddit
Android people are annoyed because it’s an invasion of their privacy. Apple people should be annoyed by this too. This isn’t a team game it’s a political issue.
Ok.
Edit: Nice. Downvotes for a one word answer.
I don’t use any Google products or services but you’re completely insufferable lololol troll so funni
Ok.
I assume you can with LineageOS and GrapheneOS
Know what they say about assumptions.
Guy who is willfully ignorant:
Where‽
Using GrapheneOS.
I’ll be switching to GrapheneOS myself soon.
Quick question: can I use the default camera that comes with Pixel on GrapheneOS? I’m going to be using a Pixel 7
Do you mean the Pixel Camera app? You can install that like a normal app from the Play Store. I’m using Open Camera instead though.
You can install that like a normal app from the Play Store.
Wait, you serious?
Losing camera functionality is really the only thing that’s been holding me back at this point!
Google/Pixel Camera is in the GrapheneOS App Store, you don’t even need the Play Store or Google account to install and use it
I mean, GrapheneOS comes with a stock camera app
The Pixel camera is different. It has features that I use regularly.
We’ve been quiet for years now. Google’s been on a path to turn Android into a locked down system for many years at this point.
It’s gonna be as bad as Apple soon.
I mean at least Apple sells less of your data, no real point in using Android at this point
If I’m learning a new OS, its not gunna be the other evil one.
It is lol.
Guess again.
No, despite Google’s gradual loving down of Android, it’s still leagues ahead of Apple in terms of openness.
Edit: I meant “locking”, but the original is funnier
Open…… for now.
No, open forever. The core of android is open source. It’s the reason that projects like GrapheneOS exist.
