Google’s AI model will potentially listen in on all your phone calls — or at least ones it suspects are coming from a fraudster.

To protect the user’s privacy, the company says Gemini Nano operates locally, without connecting to the internet. “This protection all happens on-device, so your conversation stays private to you. We’ll share more about this opt-in feature later this year,” the company says.

“This is incredibly dangerous,” says Meredith Whittaker, the president of a foundation for the end-to-end encrypted messaging app Signal.

Whittaker —a former Google employee— argues that the entire premise of the anti-scam call feature poses a potential threat. That’s because Google could potentially program the same technology to scan for other keywords, like asking for access to abortion services.

“It lays the path for centralized, device-level client-side scanning,” she said in a post on Twitter/X. “From detecting ‘scams’ it’s a short step to ‘detecting patterns commonly associated w/ seeking reproductive care’ or ‘commonly associated w/ providing LGBTQ resources’ or ‘commonly associated with tech worker whistleblowing.’”

  • sabreW4K3@lazysoci.al
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    2 months ago

    Whittaker —a former Google employee— argues that the entire premise of the anti-scam call feature poses a potential threat. That’s because Google could potentially program the same technology to scan for other keywords, like asking for access to abortion services.

    “It lays the path for centralized, device-level client-side scanning,” she said in a post on Twitter/X. “From detecting ‘scams’ it’s a short step to ‘detecting patterns commonly associated w/ seeking reproductive care’ or ‘commonly associated w/ providing LGBTQ resources’ or ‘commonly associated with tech worker whistleblowing.’”

    Absolutely. I’m just surprised that they weren’t doing this already.

    • The Hobbyist@lemmy.zip
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      2 months ago

      In some way, they were, with technologies like “hold for me” or “call screening” both of which analysed the call to have an AI respond on your behalf or let you know when the hold was over.