this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2025
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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
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)
The official reason they dropped it is because there were security concerns. The more likely reason was the massive outcry that occurs when Apple does these questionable things. Crickets when it's Google.
The feature was re-added as a child safety feature called "Comminication Saftey" that is optional on a child accounts that will automatically block nudity sent to children.