Per one tech forum this week: “Google has quietly installed an app on all Android devices called ‘Android System SafetyCore’. It claims to be a ‘security’ application, but whilst running in the background, it collects call logs, contacts, location, your microphone, and much more making this application ‘spyware’ and a HUGE privacy concern. It is strongly advised to uninstall this program if you can. To do this, navigate to 'Settings’ > 'Apps’, then delete the application.”
SafetyCore Placeholder so if it ever tries to reinstall itself it will fail due to signature mismatch.
I struggle with GitHub sometimes. It says to download the apk but I don’t see it in the file list. Anyone care to point me in the right direction?
There’s an app called obtainium that let’s you link the main page of github apps and manages both the download, the instalation and the updates of those apps.
Great if you want the latest software directly from the source.
Thanks! Til
Scroll down to releases.
Got it, thanks!
Under the end of the readme, the section labelled releases.
Got it, thanks!
At the bottom of the page, it says releases - click on the release that’s there, and that’s where you’ll find the all.
I haven’t been able to install it though due to signature mismatch, I’m not sure why…
Awesome, thanks! You didn’t install a previous version did you? Apparently you can’t update to the current version due to the signature issue.
And what exactly does the github App do?
Is suppose it’s not the same as the Google App?
It doesn’t do anything. The only reason to consider installing it is that this is cryptographically signed by another developer, so if Google tries to install safety core again, it will fail because googled signature is different. It also has a super high version number, so that Google hopefully will not think to try to install the software.
Amazing, thank you. I have uninstalled this bs twice now and have so far been spared by another force install. I hope this works
Thank you for sharing!
Google says that SafetyCore “provides on-device infrastructure for securely and privately performing classification to help users detect unwanted content. Users control SafetyCore, and SafetyCore only classifies specific content when an app requests it through an optionally enabled feature.”
GrapheneOS — an Android security developer — provides some comfort, that SafetyCore “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.”
But GrapheneOS also points out that “it’s unfortunate that it’s not open source and released as part of the Android Open Source Project and the models also aren’t open let alone open source… We’d have no problem with having local neural network features for users, but they’d have to be open source.” Which gets to transparency again.
Gimme Linux phone, I’m ready for it.
if there was something that could run android apps virtualized, I’d switch in a heartbeat
Waydroid?
To be clear, I haven’t used it at all and have no idea how well it works.
I gave it a run on Ubuntu touch with a fair phone like 8 months ago… It was still pretty rough then.
There are two solutions for that. One is Waydroid, which is basically what you’re describing. Another is android_translation_layer, which is closer to WINE in that it translates API calls to more native Linux ones, although that project is still in the alpha stages.
The Firefox Phone should’ve been a real contender. I just want a phone that takes good pictures and plays podcasts.
Unfortunately Mozilla is going the enshittification route more and more. Or good in this case that the Firefox Phone did not take of.
The app can be found here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.safetycore
The app reviews are a good read.
Thanks for the link, this is impressive because this really has all the trait of spyware; apparently it installs without asking for permission ?
Yup, heard about it a week or two ago. Found it installed on my Samsung phone, it never asked for permissions or gave any info that it was added to my phone.
For people who have not read the article:
Forbes states that there is no indication that this app can or will “phone home”.
Its stated use is for other apps to scan an image they have access to find out what kind of thing it is (known as "classification"). For example, to find out if the picture you’ve been sent is a dick-pick so the app can blur it.
My understanding is that, if this is implemented correctly (a big ‘if’) this can be completely safe.
Apps requesting classification could be limited to only classifying files that they already have access to. Remember that android has a concept of “scoped storage” nowadays that let you restrict folder access. If this is the case, well it’s no less safe than not having SafetyCore at all. It just saves you space as companies like Signal, WhatsApp etc. no longer need to train and ship their own machine learning models inside their apps, as it becomes a common library / API any app can use.
It could, of course, if implemented incorrectly, allow apps to snoop without asking for file access. I don’t know enough to say.
Besides, you think that Google isn’t already scanning for things like CSAM? It’s been confirmed to be done on platforms like Google Photos well before SafetyCore was introduced, though I’ve not seen anything about it being done on devices yet (correct me if I’m wrong).
This is EXACTLY what Apple tried to do with their on-device CSAM detection, it had a ridiculous amount of safeties to protect people’s privacy and still it got shouted down
I’m interested in seeing what happens when Holy Google, for which most nerds have a blind spot, does the exact same thing
EDIT: from looking at the downvotes, it really seems that Google can do no wrong 😆 And Apple is always the bad guy in lemmy
it had a ridiculous amount of safeties to protect people’s privacy
The hell it did, that shit was gonna snitch on its users to law enforcement.
Nope.
A human checker would get a reduced quality copy after multiple CSAM matches. No police was to be called if the human checker didn’t verify a positive match
Your idea of flooding someone with fake matches that are actually cat pics wouldn’t have worked
That’s a fucking wiretap, yo
Apple had it report suspected matches, rather than warning locally
It got canceled because the fuzzy hashing algorithms turned out to be so insecure it’s unfixable (easy to plant false positives)
Overall, I think this needs to be done by a neutral 3rd party. I just have no idea how such a 3rd party could stay neutral. Some with social media content moderation.
Google did end up doing exactly that, and what happened was, predictably, people were falsely accused of child abuse and CSAM.
I’ve just given it the boot from my phone.
It doesn’t appear to have been doing anything yet, but whatever.
Yeah no issues here just uninstalling. It hasn’t come back.
Not on mine, it doesn’t. I don’t use the Play Store. I don’t have Google Play Services. And I don’t have Google Apps installed. And I’m running Lineage OS. So, fuck you Google.
There’s one in every thread.
“i just needed to pop in here and mention that the terrible/wrong/evil thing in the post doesn’t affect me at all, like it does for you suckers ROFLMFAO…but also: LOL”
And they never say it in a helpful way, either. It’s always done in a smug way.
I can suffer a little smugness if it brings in to the fold atleast one dude who’s never heard of LineageOS
I’ve been considering putting graphene on my pixel for a month or so now, I’m just in tech and have a shit load of MFA entries in multiple apps that don’t sync anywhere, and I don’t have the energy to redo all that shit at work when I barely have enough time to do my normal shit…
I used to live rooting and throwing custom rooms on my phone, but I’ve been out of that for a decade and don’t have a usable spare device to test/use as a backup.
You can’t export your MFA? Aegis for example allows this.
Aegis is amazing for standard TOTP (6 digit code that changes every 30 minutes), but there are also proprietary OTP that require own apps and usually do not support export and would require to set it up from 0. Microsoft for example have push notifications that I love and prefer over TOTP, but for recovery purposes I have TOTP added in Aegis as well so if I ever loose MS Authenticator data, I will not be locked out.
I understand, I was in exactly the same position. Then my battery swelled and wouldn’t hold a charge at all, so I couldn’t restore anything anyway, and my last backup was inaccessible (I know I know, test your backups, but like I started this post with I’m in the same boat of all work and no time for me).
Losing everything was remarkably freeing. Just switch all your 2FA to Aegis as has been suggested, and save anything you want to back up over the wire, then take the plunge. You won’t lose everything like I had to, and you won’t regret the switch 😊
My question is, does it install as a stand alone app? Or is it part of a Google Play update chunk that you only find out after Play has updated? My system does not auto update (by design) so I’d like to know where it sources from.
I went to it on the Okay Store and uninstalled it. It didn’t commission and so far all phone functionality is working funny. It seems like an addon that’s not tightly bound to core OS components.
Don’t use Google Play. Prefer Obtanium, F-Droid or Aurora Store.
Though just not using it makes no difference. You need to remove Play Store and Play services to orevent them from tracking you and managing your apps.
Incidentally, Aurora Store is unable to find this particular app.
Sure it can:
This is the stupidest shit, moral panic levels of miscomprehension. I mean, I was miffed and promptly removed safetycore because I don’t mind seeing sex organs and don’t want shit using battery for no reason, but wow
Forbes.Edit: ok, the article is not so bad, just the shitty blurb from some forum reproduced here on Lemmy.
What about the “Android System Intelligence” app that someone else mentioned here? I just realized I have that one. It sounds like it has the capabilities to spy and maybe even more.
Here’s a link to it in PlayStore. It mentions some of the features it is a dependency for.
Well yeah, any part of the os has the capability to spy.
What do you mean by that? What I meant is that the functions, capabilities, and permissions it has could enable it to do so.
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Sometimes it uses a different name I have noticed, try to see if something with a similar is listed
i havent had it yet either. only suspicious thing that i notice is some android system intelligence, but that has been there for a while now. i havent dared to uninstall/deactivate it yet since i dont know if anything critical is dependent on it. havent even noticed any suspicious network activity either on rethink, beyond the usual bullshit like some uninstalled application still trying to connect to google as “unknown”.
Maybe they experimenting installing it on some phones, I had it but an different name. I couldn’t find it in my apps lists but when someone posted a direct link to play store app page it showed installed.
hmm, i looked it up myself and it doesnt seem to say its installed for me there. Cant find it by searching on my phone, only on my pc through search engine. But someone on comments there brought a good point by telling that his some old phone basically bricked because of this due to it being incompitable.
I also have fairphone, though i’m not sure if that really is the reason. Maybe they are indeed gradually installing it then.
Pixel 7a here, it was installed and I have no idea when
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Google harvesting all your data for profits. I’m shocked. Shocked I say.
Dood they scanned all my furry porn
