Android 10, Smart Reply and Signal

1 points by kd913 6y ago ↗ HN

Hello,

I just noticed the specific smart reply feature being touted for Android 10. Specifically the capability for Android to read texts and apply intelligence to do automatic things like pulling up directions on Google Maps.

Normally a feature like this wouldn't bother me. However, the statement that it works for Signal does.

Now it seems Google now has the ability to read these texts. This may be innocuous now and people would probably argue that all the analysis is done locally. However, my concern is that now I have to trust Google to not send it to anyone else.

This seems eerily similar to Facebook's plan a little while back to backdoor all end-to-end encryption with a local service that will scan and report suspicious content. Do you agree?

2 comments

[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 15.2 ms ] thread

notifications1 6y ago ↗

Go to signal settings -> notifications -> show -> name only, or no name and message.

That's a good point though - any app with the right permissions can read notifications from all other apps in the system, via NotificationListenerService.

tssva 6y ago ↗

Unless you changed the default notification settings in Signal to not include message content, Android and/or iOS already had access to this content and you are granting them no more trust than you have up to this point. If you have excluded message content from Signal notifications then Android will still not have access to this data.