Item — HN Reader

I've seen this article circulating other sites, and it's kind of crazy to compare that headline and the content to the reality of what's happening here. In fact, reading the article now, I see it's continuously been edited to add quotes pulled from Reddit, so I have to assume the goal here was largely just rage/engagement bait.

The reality is that it's an app that offer's some on device models to detect nsfw content. Apps can choose to use those models instead of having to implement it themselves and I think that's kind of it. There's no scanning, there's no uploading, the article is even pulling quotes from a random forum that claims it's listening to your microphone and reading your contacts. The gap between what's written and reality is really ridiculous.

There's a discussion to be had around Google's ability to update software on our phones without our control, absolutely. But that's not what this article is doing, and wont lead the majority to that topic. This article is like reading a conspiracy website, it's a flashy headline with a kernel of truth, but just leads to dangerous behavior, like all the people installing stub apks from GitHub to keep this from installing.

3 comments

Actually, all we have is Google word but we don't know exactly what this will do. Is there a proof that it will still not contact home to report whatever in some cases? Even only for a specific whitelist or government mandated secret white list? In the same way, if the Libra was pushed, there are probably things that have been pushed in other Google apps at the same time. Secretly for the moment.

Forbes is blogspam: https://larslofgren.com/forbes-marketplace/

Thanks, this is how I understand them as well for years now. I flagged this submission not because we shouldn't be critical and having a discussion about whatever this tool does but I would rather see a security professional disassembling and reverse engineering it to see what it does versus ragebait sourcing reddit comments.

if that was done in the first place would you have understood the implication and reasoning behind it. Perhaps that this article has made light of something troubling someone else can make the research claims and provide facts. Nothing wrong with this submission. Not long ago my long time google account was shut down from inappropriate material hosted on my drive which was not made clear to me what it was. Along with 100's of photos of my mom and family that i don't have any copies of were deleted. I was under the assumptions it was my naked photos when i was a kid with my mom that triggered the Child-Porn detection system which is a shame that all those photos got deleted without any evidence or notice to what actually happened. So no i don't agree with your opinion, However i ask you to allow people the ability to surface insecurities that we all share with large tech.

Yes you are right that this is nonsense. They have clearly already been doing this for years on the backend at a minimum to power the Google Photos search functionality, and who knows what else.