What's the deal with SafetyCore, the weird app that suddenly appeared on Android?

I agree that the docs for it are extremely lacking, and the way Google went about installing SafetyCore by default wasn't the best. And I also agree it would be nice if SafetyCore was open source, but the machine learning models behind it are likely still pretty cutting edge, so I can see why Google would want to keep how it works a secret.

However, those issues aside, the software itself sounds extremely beneficial, especially in actually helping preserve user privacy since apps can now scan for malicious content on-device, instead of having to send any data somewhere external for analysis. From the GrapheneOS team:

The app 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.

Google Messages uses this new app to classify messages as spam, malware, nudity, etc. Nudity detection is an optional feature which blurs media detected as having nudity and makes accessing it require going through a dialog.

Classifying things like this is not the same as trying to detect illegal content and reporting it to a service. That would greatly violate people's privacy in multiple ways and false positives would still exist. It's not what this is and it's not usable for it.

https://x.com/GrapheneOS/status/1888280836426084502

p.s. Hopefully that means no more getting surprised by unsolicited dick pics thanks to the nudity detection feature. ;)

I'm not too concerned that it takes up extra storage--although 2GB is A LOT!

What really annoys me with these kinds of things is that it will cause more people to upgrade their phone because it feels slow and the battery doesn't last as long for some reason...

There are several problems with how this was handled which means that while something like this could actually be useful, my reaction is to just get rid rid of it.

• no notification or, gasp consent sought for a new large component
• no settings that at least I know of to granularly enable/disable functionality
• zero guarantees that it wont start sending somewhere with no notice, especially concerning because of thw previous points
• non-descriptive potentionaly misleading name