Per one tech forum this week: “Google has quietly installed an app on all Android devices called ‘Android System SafetyCore’. It claims to be a ‘security’ application, but whilst running in the background, it collects call logs, contacts, location, your microphone, and much more making this application ‘spyware’ and a HUGE privacy concern. It is strongly advised to uninstall this program if you can. To do this, navigate to 'Settings’ > 'Apps’, then delete the application.”
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Gimme Linux phone, I’m ready for it.
if there was something that could run android apps virtualized, I’d switch in a heartbeat
For people who have not read the article:
Forbes states that there is no indication that this app can or will “phone home”.
Its stated use is for other apps to scan an image they have access to find out what kind of thing it is (known as "classification"). For example, to find out if the picture you’ve been sent is a dick-pick so the app can blur it.
My understanding is that, if this is implemented correctly (a big ‘if’) this can be completely safe.
Apps requesting classification could be limited to only classifying files that they already have access to. Remember that android has a concept of “scoped storage” nowadays that let you restrict folder access. If this is the case, well it’s no less safe than not having SafetyCore at all. It just saves you space as companies like Signal, WhatsApp etc. no longer need to train and ship their own machine learning models inside their apps, as it becomes a common library / API any app can use.
It could, of course, if implemented incorrectly, allow apps to snoop without asking for file access. I don’t know enough to say.
Besides, you think that Google isn’t already scanning for things like CSAM? It’s been confirmed to be done on platforms like Google Photos well before SafetyCore was introduced, though I’ve not seen anything about it being done on devices yet (correct me if I’m wrong).
This is EXACTLY what Apple tried to do with their on-device CSAM detection, it had a ridiculous amount of safeties to protect people’s privacy and still it got shouted down
I’m interested in seeing what happens when Holy Google, for which most nerds have a blind spot, does the exact same thing
EDIT: from looking at the downvotes, it really seems that Google can do no wrong 😆 And Apple is always the bad guy in lemmy
Apple had it report suspected matches, rather than warning locally
It got canceled because the fuzzy hashing algorithms turned out to be so insecure it’s unfixable (easy to plant false positives)
Google did end up doing exactly that, and what happened was, predictably, people were falsely accused of child abuse and CSAM.
it had a ridiculous amount of safeties to protect people’s privacy
The hell it did, that shit was gonna snitch on its users to law enforcement.
Nope.
A human checker would get a reduced quality copy after multiple CSAM matches. No police was to be called if the human checker didn’t verify a positive match
Your idea of flooding someone with fake matches that are actually cat pics wouldn’t have worked
That’s a fucking wiretap, yo
SafetyCore Placeholder so if it ever tries to reinstall itself it will fail due to signature mismatch.
The app can be found here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.safetycore
The app reviews are a good read.
Thanks for the link, this is impressive because this really has all the trait of spyware; apparently it installs without asking for permission ?
Per one tech forum this week
Stop spreading misinformation.
To quote the most salient post
The app doesn’t provide client-side scanning used to report things to Google or anyone else. It provides on-device machine learning models usable by applications to classify content as being spam, scams, malware, etc. This allows apps to check content locally without sharing it with a service and mark it with warnings for users.
Which is a sorely needed feature to tackle problems like SMS scams
And what exactly does that have to do with GrapheneOS?
Please, read the links. They are the security and privacy experts when it comes to Android. That’s their explanation of what this Android System SafetyCore actually is.
I’ve just given it the boot from my phone.
It doesn’t appear to have been doing anything yet, but whatever.
People don’t seem to understand the risks presented by normalizing client-side scanning on closed source devices. Think about how image recognition works. It scans image content locally and matches to keywords or tags, describing the person, objects, emotions, and other characteristics. Even the rudimentary open-source model on an immich deployment on a Raspberry Pi can process thousands of images and make all the contents searchable with alarming speed and accuracy.
So once similar image analysis is done on a phone locally, and pre-encryption, it is trivial for Apple or Google to use that for whatever purposes their use terms allow. Forget the iCloud encryption backdoor. The big tech players can already scan content on your device pre-encryption.
And just because someone does a traffic analysis of the process itself (safety core or mediaanalysisd or whatever) and shows it doesn’t directly phone home, doesn’t mean it is safe. The entire OS is closed source, and it needs only to backchannel small amounts of data in order to fuck you over.
Remember the original justification for clientside scanning from Apple was “detecting CSAM”. Well they backed away from that line of thinking but they kept all the client side scanning in iOS and Mac OS. It would be trivial for them to flag many other types of content and furnish that data to governments or third parties.
