this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2025
966 points (96.9% liked)
Technology
63375 readers
5667 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
To quote the most salient post
Which is a sorely needed feature to tackle problems like SMS scams
You don't need advanced scanning technology running on every device with access to every single bit of data you ever seen to detect scam. You need telco operator to stop forwarding forged messages headers and… that's it. Cheap, efficient, zero risk related to invasion of privacy through a piece of software you did not need but was put there "for your own good".
Why do you need machine learning for detecting scams?
Is someone in 2025 trying to help you out of the goodness of their heart? No. Move on.
If you want to talk money then it is in businesses best interest that money from their users is being used on their products, not being scammed through the use of their products.
Secondly machine learning or algorithms can detect patterns in ways a human can't. In some circles I've read that the programmers themselves can't decipher in the code how the end result is spat out, just that the inputs will guide it. Besides the fact that scammers can circumvent any carefully laid down antispam, antiscam, anti-virus through traditional software, a learning algorithm will be magnitudes harder to bypass. Or easier. Depends on the algorithm
I don't know the point of the first paragraph...scams are bad? Yes? Does anyone not agree? (I guess scammers)
For the second we are talking in the wild abstract, so I feel comfortable pointing out that every automated system humanity has come up with so far has pulled in our own biases and since ai models are trained by us, this should be no different. Second, if the models are fallible, you cannot talk about success without talking false positives. I don't care if it blocks every scammer out there if it also blocks a message from my doctor. Until we have data on consensus between these new algorithms and desired outcomes, it's pointless to claim they are better at X.
if the cellular carriers were forced to verify that caller-ID (or SMS equivalent) was accurate SMS scams would disappear (or at least be weaker). Google shouldn't have to do the job of the carriers, and if they wanted to implement this anyway they should let the user choose what service they want to perform the task similar to how they let the user choose which "Android system WebView" should be used.
Carriers don't care. They are selling you data. They don't care how it's used. Google is selling you a phone. Apple held down the market for a long time for being the phone that has some of the best security. As an android user that makes me want to switch phones. Not carriers.