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Google’s ‘Secret’ Update Scans All Your Photos (www.forbes.com)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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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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[–] 30 points 2 years ago (5 children)

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.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago

    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.”

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