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.’”
Let’s talk about wiretapping laws and states where two-party consent is required to record a call.
Where I live, I must notify the other party that I am recording. If not, it’s illegal. Also, any audio recorded without consent is not admissible in court.
Complete tangent but what is two-party consent even for? I can imagine it gets in the way of getting a lot of evidence in cases of domestic abuse or organized crime.
Caller: [threatens me for 45 seconds] Me: “Could you call me again and repeat all that, for the recording?” Caller: [hangs]
Means both parties have to agree to be recorded (usually at the onset of a call).
“Be advised, this call is recorded for quality assurance purposes” at which point you could hang up. The 4th Amendment still applies in America, regardless of what local cops and prosecutors believe. You have a right to privacy in two-party conversations.
not admissible in court
I get what you’re saying there but that sounds very much like the kind of detail that s possible future Trump administration wouldn’t much care about
That is probably the dumbest thing you said all week. At least, I hope it is because i don’t want to know how much dumber than that you can get.
