Scams are getting more and more common nowadays, with folks loosing a lot of money due to this. We absolutely need more ways to detect and warn people about scams but I don’t think this is the right approach. By ‘this’, I am talking about Google’s recent announcement at Google I/O to use Gemini Nano to alert users to potential scams during a phone call.
The feature, which will be built into a future version of Android, uses Gemini Nano, the smallest version of Google’s generative AI offering, which can be run entirely on-device. The system effectively listens for “conversation patterns commonly associated with scams” in real time. Google gives the example of someone pretending to be a “bank representative.” Common scammer tactics like password requests and gift cards will also trigger the system. These are all pretty well understood to be ways of extracting your money from you, but plenty of people in the world are still vulnerable to these sorts of scams. Once set off, it will pop up a notification that the user may be falling prey to unsavory characters.
In order for the functionality to work we would have to give Google full and complete access to all our phonecalls & audio during the call. I don’t know about you but I don’t want to give this kind of personal data over to a company that has already lied about the data they collect (referring to the recent lawsuit on their tracking the web-browsing habits of users in incognito mode that they settled last month).
– Suramya
Source: Slashdot: Google Will Use Gemini To Detect Scams During Calls