Google Online Security Blog: Safer with Google: New intelligent, real-time protections on Android to keep you safe

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Safer with Google: New intelligent, real-time protections on Android to keep you safe

13. November 2024

Posted by Lyubov Farafonova, Product Manager and Steve Kafka, Group Product Manager, Android User safety is at the heart of everything we do at Google. Our mission to make technology helpful for everyone means building features that protect you while keeping your privacy top of mind. From Gmail’s defenses that stop more than 99.9% of spam, phishing and malware, to Google Messages’ advanced security that protects users from 2 billion suspicious messages a month and beyond, we're constantly developing and expanding protection features that help keep you safe. We're introducing two new real-time protection features that enhance your safety, all while safeguarding your privacy: Scam Detection in Phone by Google to protect you from scams and fraud, and Google Play Protect live threat detection with real-time alerts to protect you from malware and dangerous apps. These new security features are available first on Pixel, and are coming soon to more Android devices. More intelligent AI-powered protection against scams Scammers steal over $1 trillion dollars a year from people, and phone calls are their favorite way to do it. Even more alarming, scam calls are evolving, becoming increasingly more sophisticated, damaging and harder to identify. That’s why we’re using the best of Google AI to identify and stop scams before they can do harm with Scam Detection.

Real-time protection, built with your privacy in mind.

Real-time defense, right on your device: Scam Detection uses powerful on-device AI to notify you of a potential scam call happening in real-time by detecting conversation patterns commonly associated with scams. For example, if a caller claims to be from your bank and asks you to urgently transfer funds due to an alleged account breach, Scam Detection will process the call to determine whether the call is likely spam and, if so, can provide an audio and haptic alert and visual warning that the call may be a scam.

Private by design, you’re always in control: We’ve built Scam Detection to protect your privacy and ensure you’re always in control of your data. Scam Detection is off by default, and you can decide whether you want to activate it for future calls. At any time, you can turn it off for all calls in the Phone app Settings, or during a particular call. The AI detection model and processing are fully on-device, which means that no conversation audio or transcription is stored on the device, sent to Google servers or anywhere else, or retrievable after the call.

Cutting-edge AI protection, now on more Pixel phones: Gemini Nano, our advanced on-device AI model, powers Scam Detection on Pixel 9 series devices. As part of our commitment to bring powerful AI features to even more devices, this AI-powered protection is available to Pixel 6+ users thanks to other robust Google on-device machine learning models.

We’re now rolling out Scam Detection to English-speaking Phone by Google public beta users in the U.S. with a Pixel 6 or newer device.
To provide feedback on your experience, please click on Phone by Google App -> Menu -> Help & Feedback -> Send Feedback. We look forward to learning from this beta and your feedback, and we’ll share more about Scam Detection in the months ahead. More real-time alerts to protect you from bad apps Google Play Protect works non-stop to protect you in real-time from malware and unsafe apps. Play Protect analyzes behavioral signals related to the use of sensitive permissions and interactions with other apps and services.

With live threat detection, if a harmful app is found, you'll now receive a real-time alert, allowing you to take immediate action to protect your device. By looking at actual activity patterns of apps, live threat detection can now find malicious apps that try extra hard to hide their behavior or lie dormant for a time before engaging in suspicious activity.

At launch, live threat detection will focus on stalkerware, code that may collect personal or sensitive data for monitoring purposes without user consent, and we will explore expanding its detection to other types of harmful apps in the future. All of this protection happens on your device in a privacy preserving way through Private Compute Core, which allows us to protect users without collecting data. Live threat detection with real-time alerts in Google Play Protect are now available on Pixel 6+ devices and will be coming to additional phone makers in the coming months.