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
Google has been scanning your photos for a long time, both in the Gallery and the Photos app. Yes, with AI.
Unhinged behaviour that we just supposed to accept becuase a mega corpo is doing it?
Who asked for this?
Authoritarian governments probs
I have started to leave google. Can I ask them to remove any scanned data?
You can ask, but I doubt they’ll do it, even if they say they do.
George Orwell was off by a few decades, it seems.
While I understand your point, the biggest misconception about the 1984 book is that it’s mainly about surveillance — it’s about manipulation of words, e.g. Ministry of “Peace”.
The words led to the acceptance of the surveillance.
While I understand your point, it was never implied in my comment that 1984 is mainly about surveillance — in fact, it implicitly drew a parallel to the fictional setting of 1984, e.g. “the dystopian future wherein total surveillance to control the narrative” appearing to have become reality.
At the time, Google assured me that SafetyCore was an enabling framework and would not actually start scanning photos or other content.
I audibly snorted at this.
Well that time has now come and it starts with Google Messages. As reported by 9to5Google, “Google Messages is rolling out Sensitive Content Warnings that blur nude images on Android.”
I know whenever my phone announces of its own accord that it’s figured out that an image on my phone is a nude, the first word that comes to mind is “safe.”
