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.”
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 have system updates disabled and still found this piece of shit installed.
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.
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Google photos has been “searchable by name” for years now. Tell it the name of a face in one photo and it can go search (pretty successfully) through all your photos for other photos containing that person. And, of course, once told, it never forgets.
Is it still a service when you are the product? Or, are you being served? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Serve_Man_(The_Twilight_Zone)
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.
Graphene could easily allow for open source solutions to emulate the SafetyCore interface. Like how it handles Google’s location services.
There’s plenty of open source libraries and models for running local AI, seems like this is something that could be easily replicated in the FOSS world.
Fuck these cunt
Thnx for this, just uninstalled it, google are arseholes
Great, it’ll have to plow through ~30GB of 1080p recordings of darkness and my upstairs neighbors living it up in the AMs. And nothing else.
There’s this, and another weather app. Uninstall both asap
…this link is about Safety core. Which weather app?
There’s another one mentioned in the comments
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Why are you linking to a known Nazi website?
Because that’s where I got the info from first? Grow up
Can you share a summary or a screenshot to make it more accessible please?
Kind of weird that they are installing this dependency whether you will enable those planned scanning features or not. Here is an article mentioning that future feature Sensitive Content Warnings. It does sound kind of cool, less chance to accidentally send your dick pic to someone I guess.
Sensitive Content Warnings is an optional feature that blurs images that may contain nudity before viewing, and then prompts with a “speed bump” that contains help-finding resources and options, including to view the content. When the feature is enabled, and an image that may contain nudity is about to be sent or forwarded, it also provides a speed bump to remind users of the risks of sending nude imagery and preventing accidental shares.
All of this happens on-device to protect your privacy and keep end-to-end encrypted message content private to only sender and recipient. Sensitive Content Warnings doesn’t allow Google access to the contents of your images, nor does Google know that nudity may have been detected. This feature is opt-in for adults, managed via Android Settings, and is opt-out for users under 18 years of age.
Looks like more of a chance of false positives happening and getting the police to raid your home to confiscate your devices. I don’t care what the article says I know Google is getting access to that data because that’s who they are.
Just for verifying accuracy and improving the product.
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Most people don’t really know what that actually means, and they don’t feel they have anything to hide from some nebulous corporate entity.
why, what do you recommend?
I mean you have just disclaime the whole android ecosystem, and the only other alternative is Apple, which is questionable if it’s better.
and this would have even applied to my fairphone!
would have, if I didn’t get rid of google services the day I got it.I don’t have to recommend anything just because I’m asking why people are buying spyware tech.
Just like I may not know the proper way to safely jump out of an airplane, but I do know a parachute is involved.
A person asking why people do a thing that seems stupid isn’t obligated to solve the problem.
Then I guess the better question is what do you use?
Wouldn’t it be a given that I don’t have an android phone?
That’s what you don’t use, which wasn’t what they asked, right?
I just realized the network error made me doubly post my comment, I’ve deleted the other copy
No worries. Happens to all of us.
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Thank you was able to find and uninstall the app with no issues
Samsung? I was able to on my s23ultra
It didn’t appear in my apps list so I thought it wasn’t installed. But when I searched for the app name it appears. So be aware.
How did you search for it? Search bar in settings?
On my settings screen I have a search bar at the top
Tried that, found nothing.
you can look it up on your app managment settings too, search for it there.
Found nothing
Play Store, it doesn’t show in local search results, but they list it as installed.
Even worse, i found this comment in the app store and it did the same on my device :
Installed automatically without my knowledge, no notification, only found it because of a friend’s post, and even then, you only see it through a link, it doesn’t come up in your app list or a search of the Google play store. I thought it felt like my battery was draining a little quicker too, which is apparently also something noticed in connection to having this app. Uninstalling.
The app can be found here :
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.safetycore
.i was able to find it on my oneplus, and i also noticed, why is my oneplus 12r draining so fast?
Oh right, maybe I noticed because of Storage Isolation, that’s an app which allows you to restrict folder access of other apps, and it prompts me to select actions for every newly installed app. So it casually prompts me whenever google pushes a new, hidden installation.
i believe this application hides in different ways on different devices and maybe it is also different by regions making it even worse to detect and explain to someone else. So, i wouldn’t be surprised if you told me you found it in a different way than how it was explained in my comment.
.
also in the Forbes article :
Per one tech forum (
https://gbatemp.net/threads/psa-to-all-android-users-google-quietly-installs-spyware-on-android-devices.667542/GBAtemp.net - The Independent Video Game Community
)
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.… →
Remove the following 2 spywares :
1).
Android System SafetyCore: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.safetycore
2).
Android System Key Verifier: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.contactkeysYep, I’ve removed both of those the second they showed up on my phone uninvited. Even as a non-US citizen, with the current state of their government, I definitely don’t want any corporate collecting data on myself.
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I just un-installed it
Anyone know what Android System Intelligence does? Should that be un-installed as well?
I’m not seeing it on my S22, but I am seeing system intelligence. What is it?
First result of DDG search, explains it quite well: https://www.androidauthority.com/android-system-intelligence-3325187/
You can safely uninstall System Intelligence if you don’t need it. My phone has worked fine without it in the past year.
Jesus Christ they’re like bed bugs
Is it too much to ask that my phone only contain the shit that makes it work, and not anything else?
Its a classic example of using “BUT THE CHILDREN” to be invasive dickheads.
And it immediately reminds me of the story of the guy whose kid had a rash in the diaper area during covid, and the pediatrician requested pictures to remotely diagnose and treat, which google flagged as child pornography and called the cops on him, and banned/locked him out of everything (phone number, emails, pictures, etc etc) because he had everything on google.
and no amount of the police, or even doctor, insisting the pictures were medical necessity and not child pornography would convince google to restore his acount or even let him recover his number/email/pictures/etc.
The fact that Google refused to restore his account even after the police that they called said there was no child porn pisses me off to no end. They are officially allowed to close your account for no reason other than they don’t like you.
not only refused to restore the account, but still insisted he was a pedophile producing child pornography despite the cops and doctors and every other authority involved insisting he wasnt, and that the images were medically necessary, and refuse to even give/let him get a backup of all his family pictures, emails, etc.
and theres gonna be a lot more of it once this stupid invasive spyware rolls out and gets going.
If our parents and grandparents photos were digitized, they’d all probably be labled child porn producers, because almost every parent/grandparent/etc has some picture of their newborn getting a sink bath or some other completely harmless, and otherwise normal photo.
and I think its so they can artificially inflate their numbers. They arent doing shit to stop actual child exploitation, so they hammer hard on this shit so they can make a big show of “cracking down and stopping” it.
Google says that SafetyCore “provides on-device infrastructure for securely and privately performing classification to help users detect unwanted content
Cheers Google but I’m a capable adult, and able to do this myself.
Thanks for posting, I just uninstalled
