Google Gemini won't upload your data when detecting bank scams during phone calls

Google arrived big on Tuesday at the annual Google I/O event. The Mountain View tech giant announced a lot of interesting tidbits and updates to Gemini, its popular AI large language model (LLM). 

Besides the Gemini 1.5 Flash model, its lightweight sister, a lot of new Gemini capabilities also got a considerable amount of airtime. One of them is the feature that gives you a real-time alert when a fraudster pretending to be your bank calls you and gives you odd requests like requesting PINs or passwords.

The premise is simple: Gemini listens to your phone conversation. But, if the “bank representative” on the other side of the line requests things that most bank scammers do, you will see a button to end the call immediately and a pop-up that says “Likely scam: Banks will never ask you to move your money to keep it safe.”

Of course, there are concerns about Google listening to your conversation. It’s a common secret that the Mountain View tech giant was in hot water for multiple targeted advertising scandals in the past few years. But, Google says that all the process behind this “happens on-device,” so there’s no worry about that. 

In the same announcement, Google also brings Gemini to Google Photos for its latest AI-powered feature, Ask Photos. It can understand the context of every single image saved in your storage and even scans for texts inside them, so you can pull up prompts like, “Fetch me images of my swimming lesson journey,” or, “What’s the plate number of my car?”

But, again, Google says that the process stays on your device. It won’t save queries to the training, except in some rare cases that involve abuses and harm. There may be a loophole in this, that’s for sure, but Google will surely and quickly patch it up.