Technology

Okay, thinking on this more, I have a very hot take here.

What's the big deal?

Google is seemingly offering a locally processed machine vision API to other apps, as far as I tell. This might manifest as some messaging service nagging you if you try to send nudes to someone, or filtering porn out of a feed. Or other "safety" features I suppose, like classifying slur-laden messages as abusive.

...But Google was most certainly doing this with Google apps already. Like the stock photo library most apps use.

If people are already using unprivate services for this kind of thing, honestly, they were digging their own grave, and this hardly moves the needle. All it does is make the spying/censorship more apparent.

I say those users need a cold bucket of water to the face, and this may provide it.

...But otherwise, it wont affect apps that dont use the API, right?

hey folks i got graphene, do i need to worry about this or is this what the sandbox is for?

just hoping my current phone survives ling ebough that my next one can be a linux phone

Thankfully, I switched to Droidian at the start of this year. I am NOT looking back.

Apple already uses machine vision for photo searching, that weird auto categorization it does and such. They have for years.

I would bet the photos app already classifies nudes, but silenty, mostly so it doesnt add your nudes to an auto album.

Aren’t viruses and spyware illegal?

what the fuck? I had no idea about this. I never opted into this.

If we weren't so fucking weak and unorganized, we'd be burning their companies and their homes to the fucking ground.

You can uninstall it and install this so that Google can't get it back on your system.

https://github.com/daboynb/Safetycore-placeholder

I once stumbled upon this app automatically installed on the phone I happen to have paid for (because at this point I doubt I could call this piece of metallic tile "my phone" and suing Google Inc. for them to refund me this phone would be as successful as if I tried to push and move a certain Mountain View building from its place with my own muscles). Shortly after that, it seems to have vanished from the list of apps as mysteriously as it initially appeared, either it uninstalled itself or it was changed names.

In any case, as soon as I realized that presence and realized I wouldn't have an "uninstall" option without turning on options that would straightforwardly break banking apps and government apps (gov.br the Brazilian app for everything citizen-related) I was compelled to use, I started filling the phone's gallery with all sorts of potentially-triggering stuff I either find online or (mainly) make myself: dark art including FNAF-like jump scares, haunted/cursed artifacts and occult/ritualistic imagery, photos and videos depicting snakes and scorpions, lots of Memento Mori including photos of cemeteries and tombstones, archaeological skeletons, buzzards eating animal carcasses in the wilderness, as well as media of my own cut wr... I mean, uhm, media of my own cute wrathful owl I sculpted on Blender. Yeah, several different 3d rendered scenes and short animation videos as well, especially scenes in which she's performing chases and huntings... Not to mention the plethora of owl photos and videos, many of which are birdwatching of them catching and eating prey on nature, in potentially gory settings (i.e. the unfiltered, untamed nature who doesn't care about our anthropocentric definitions of good and evil).

So if Google decides to start "protecting me from (my own) sensitive imagery", their clanker is essentially going to have a hard time having to go through gibibytes of media and potentially wiping the whole device as I made sure to fill the entire storage (even non-media things too, such as using provoking nicknames for fictional contacts like a contact card for "Inanna", as well as odd descriptions for bank transactions such as "my soul belongs to Ereshkigal") with purposefully sensitive content. If they do that, I'll then have something more concrete to sue them for: religious intolerance, as it's all representing of my left-hand path spirituality.

And with all this I leave this one absurdist idea on how to try and boycott the corporate nanny (and surveillance). A phone gallery full of sensitive items (not nudes, but dark/provocative art purposefully built to trigger similar nannying responses) will hopefully overwhelm their servers, shall they offload the computing to their data centers. If this doesn't overwhelm their servers, at least the techbros and their clankers are going to have an interesting time when scrolling through legal-yet-disturbing content they hoarded from Android users' phones.

!technology@lemmy.world