Technology

True or not, one can avoid the whole issue by using your phone as a phone, maybe to send texts, with location, mike, and camera switched off permanently, and all the other apps deleted or disabled. Sure, Google will still know you called your SO daily and your Mom once a week (NOT ENOUGH!), and that you were supposed to pick up the dry cleaning last night (did you?). Meh. If that's what floats the Surveillance Society's boat, I am not too worried.

Thanks for bringing this up, first I've heard of it. Not present on my GrapheneOS pixel, present on stock.

I suppose I should encourage pixel owners to switch from stock to graphene, I know which decide I rather spend time using. GrapheneOS one of course.

Fuck these cunt

Well then I hope they like seeing my butthole.

I switched over to GrapheneOS a couple months ago and couldn't be happier. If you have a Pixel the switch is really easy. The biggest obstacle was exporting my contacts from my google account.

I just un-installed it

Anyone know what Android System Intelligence does? Should that be un-installed as well?

Hope they like all my dick pics

Thank you was able to find and uninstall the app with no issues

SafetyCore Placeholder so if it ever tries to reinstall itself it will fail due to signature mismatch.

Gimme Linux phone, I’m ready for it.

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.

It didn't appear in my apps list so I thought it wasn't installed. But when I searched for the app name it appears. So be aware.

I'd that what's killing my fucking battery like crazy lately?

Even with the latest update from Samsung, I am not seeing this app. My OnePlus did get it with the February update and I had to remove it.

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).

Google says that SafetyCore “provides on-device infrastructure for securely and privately performing classification to help users detect unwanted content. Users control SafetyCore, and SafetyCore only classifies specific content when an app requests it through an optionally enabled feature.”

GrapheneOS — an Android security developer — provides some comfort, that SafetyCore “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.”

But GrapheneOS also points out that “it’s unfortunate that it’s not open source and released as part of the Android Open Source Project and the models also aren’t open let alone open source… We’d have no problem with having local neural network features for users, but they’d have to be open source.” Which gets to transparency again.

Seems to be innocuous, but there's no harm in removing it. Next update, it'll be returned, so the better solution long-term will be (if you're rooted) is to use an application to freeze it, which effectively disables it and it should survive and update. If you delete the app, a new update will put it back.