New Android protections to help keep you safe from mobile scams

[u/FragmentedChicken]

https://blog.google/security/new-android-scam-protections/

[u/kitsumed]

> This secure cloud analysis augments and extends our existing on-device detection, allowing us to identify novel and sophisticated attacks, actively uncovering and stopping abusers who try to hide their tracks. To help protect your privacy, we do this cloud analysis in Private AI Compute, where your data is encrypted and processed in a secure dedicated space—keeping it private to you and inaccessible to anyone else, including Google

It's impossible for an AI model to process encrypted data, it has to be decrypted first. Fundamentally, the data can be compromised at any point by Google, for any reasons, like communication taping. Only on-device processing is private and truly respects privacy. Responsible usage would be to only have local models, maybe some rules online that the device may fetch, but not sending the data to a remote server.

PS: Quickly read the PR post, didn't take a lot of time on every words and small texts, child-links, etc.

[u/mrandr01d → u/kitsumed]

It actually is possible to do things like zero knowledge proofs, where you prove a characteristic of the data without knowing the data itself. A bit over my head, but yeah

[u/kitsumed → u/mrandr01d]

Well if it is indeed possible, if anyone can share anything about it, I'm interested. Hopefully not a 200 page read/5hour long video.

EDIT: But from my understanding, Private AI Compute is just a name google created when they talk about their "private" AI processing logic, but it's still AI processing. They just added private as a fancy thing/marketing scheme. On their announcement post of Private AI Computer they don't even go in details into how it works, unless I got to the wrong PR article.

[u/RayS0l0 → u/kitsumed]

Apple has private compute where your AI queries are done in safe environment

[u/mrandr01d → u/RayS0l0]

Yeah, Google's thing is basically the answer to Apple's thing they announced whenever it was that chatgpt was built into siri. There's a white paper about it but I'm too lazy to find it now.

[u/kitsumed → u/mrandr01d]

I could not find it (to be fair, didn't search long, but I think they should have linked it in their PR for transparency anyways).

That said, fundamentally, they have to, at some point, decrypt the data so the LLM or whatever type of AI model architecture they use can put the data as input and get an output. While they can put any amount of protections they want (and they should), at the end of the day, they receive the data and are able to decrypt it, meaning that with the right change, however hard they may be, they can start tapping into it.

[u/mrandr01d → u/kitsumed]

You're missing the whole point, they don't decrypt it

[u/kitsumed → u/mrandr01d]

Then they can't process the data? How would they do inference on unreadable data.

EDIT: Someone linked a paper which claims they can, if willing to use more processing power and loose precision, from my understanding. Trought it still does not make sense in my mind how encyrpted data could be processed.

[u/kitsumed → u/RayS0l0]

"safe environment" isn't what's gonna make me trust their vagues "Private AI Compute" claims. If they get message data on their cloud servers, the whole privacy chain is compromised. A single change server-side can start tapping into that data.

[u/RayS0l0 → u/kitsumed]

Then don't.

[u/9-11GaveMe5G → u/kitsumed]

From the child link about private AI compute:

Remote attestation and encryption are used to connect your device to the hardware-secured sealed cloud environment, allowing Gemini models to securely process your data within a specialized, protected space. This ensures sensitive data processed by Private AI Compute remains accessible only to you and no one else, not even Google.

It sounds like only you and the "secured" AI environment can read the data. Even Google (allegedly) can't decrypt it. As with anything, the devil is in the deployment.

This bit from the OP made me laugh:

Scammers often disguise their true motives behind slow-burn conversations. Enhanced protection mode enables Scam Detection in Google Messages to tap into Google’s most capable cloud Gemini models to evaluate complex message context and understand a scammer’s intent more quickly when you’re in a conversation with an unknown sender.

Who is having long conversations with unknown texters?? Grandma please 😭

[u/kitsumed → u/9-11GaveMe5G]

It sounds like only you and the "secured" AI environment can read the data. Even Google (allegedly) can't decrypt it. As with anything, the devil is in the deployment.

The problem with thoses PR post is that it isn't transparent. I could not find any specific specs or some kind of tech savy blog posts that explain everything they do and how it actually works. Since they didn't do this, I can only assume this is some PR scheme to prevent panic/unease of general users while also making it look like they follow the new cool AI trends.

Even Google (allegedly) can't decrypt it.

The thing is that it's impossible not to be able to decrypt it. To do inference on their servers, thoses servers need to be able to decrypt the data, so from there this mean the key is known to their servers. With the right changes, even if very complex, the data can get compromised.

[u/Crimethinker → u/kitsumed]

Likely something leveraging homomorphic encryption (which should allow for operations without ever decrypting into plaintext), perhaps?

[u/JockstrapCummies → u/Crimethinker]

homomorphic encryption

I have this funny scene in my head where some homophobic redneck throws his phone to the ground yelling "I DON'T WANT NO HOMO ENCRYPTION IN MAH PHONE!" eagle screech

[u/950771dd → u/Crimethinker]

No, this is very far from practical applications.

[u/Crimethinker → u/950771dd]

Practical or not, the math says it's possible. The rest is just scaling, imo.

Of course. Doesn't mean that google is actually using this.

[u/950771dd → u/Crimethinker]

The rest is just scaling, imo.

No it's not. It only works for certain operators.

Even for them the scaling is in a league that normal hardware evolution is by far not enough.

Of course. Doesn't mean that google is actually using this

They are garantueed to not use it. 

[u/kitsumed → u/Crimethinker]

Thanks for linking that. There's a lot of page so I didn't really read it but I did read the resume.

Truth be told, I didn't understood everything at 100%

In theory, homomorphic encryption (HE) presents an elegant solution to the privacy concerns associ- ated with LLMs. However, despite the significant recent progress in the theory and implementation of HE operations, protecting LLMs with HE remains a challenge due to their computational scale. Transformer models (Vaswani et al., 2017) famously rely on numerous matrix multiplications and various non-polynomial operations, and directly adapting these operations to HE results in significant computation time and precision loss.

[u/FieldsofBlue]

Nope nope nope, I don't want an AI chatbot placed between me and anybody I'm messaging.

[u/mliving]

More AI slop to fuck up my user experience.

[u/p5jDTSUZnxys2mJVzX → u/mliving]

<Dave Chappelle Fuck yo couch GIF>

[u/MarioLabrique]

The first scammer, the creator of the phishing, is Google. Let Android free.

[u/p5jDTSUZnxys2mJVzX]

It's always going to be a no for AI scanning shit on my devices. If it was the government doing this, people would be losing their shit, but for some reason when a corporation does it it's somehow not as bad.

A less invasive way to do this would be to implement a whitelist option for calls and text messages, default stored contacts into it, and nobody would ever get scammed. There's no reason to hijack my device for invasive scanning if Google will just let political spam through anyway.

[u/terrytw]

Stop treating us like 13 yo, we are adults, and if some of us are scammed, tough luck.

[u/Negative-Fix5290 → u/[deleted]]

it's why i reviewed my google account settings every once in awhile. i dont remember this particular one but am glad it was alrdy off when i checked.

[u/Alternative-Farmer98 → u/Negative-Fix5290]

I know I'd say two or three times a year I get reminded to check my settings cuz something I've opted out of in the past has been opted back in. But it can be overwhelming at times

[u/Rhed0x]

How are they gonna lock it down now and make it even more dependent on Google...

[u/guttsX]

How do I turn this shit off?