Google Messages has announced five upcoming security features to make conversations in its Android app more secure and private.
First, we’re improving fraud detection. This feature uses on-device machine learning, a subfield of AI, to detect fraudulent texts such as fraudulent package delivery texts and job fraud texts. Once identified, they are automatically sent to spam folders or alerted to the user. Currently available to beta users of Google Messages who have spam protection enabled.
Google Messages may also soon warn users about dangerous links they receive. The company has already tested the feature in India, Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore, and plans to expand it globally later this year. Alert users when they receive a link from an unknown sender and block messages containing links from suspicious senders.
Because spam texts often come from international numbers, Google Messages is also working on a feature that will hide messages from unknown international numbers and automatically send them to your Spam & Block folder. I’m here. Google plans to test the feature in Singapore later this year.
Another big addition to Google Messages is sensitive content warnings. This is something that several social media platforms, such as Apple and Instagram, already offer. Enabling this feature blurs messages containing nude images and displays a prompt with resources and options, but ultimately allows the recipient to view the content. Google says messages are end-to-end encrypted, so nude images cannot be accessed or viewed. This feature will roll out to devices running Android 9 and later in the coming months, and will be enabled by default for users under 18.
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Google is also working on features to help you verify your contacts and make sure you’re sending text messages to the right people. To make this possible, Google is working on developing a “unified system of public key verification” across apps, which can be verified using QR codes or number comparisons. The feature will work with Google Messages and several other Android messaging apps and is expected to roll out sometime next year.
Google tested similar AI-powered fraud detection in Gmail earlier this year and demonstrated at a conference how AI can identify phishing scams. We also developed a feature for Android that uses Gemini AI to detect phone fraud in real time.
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