Google just made it way harder for scammers to trick Android users


One of the worst things about the explosion of AI tools is how much more advanced scam calls have become. It’s now entirely possible to get fake calls with voices that sound exactly like people you know. The June Android drop is here to address this (and add some other goodies).

Fake Call Detection

When scammers impersonate your contacts

1. Call spoofing diagram Credit: Google

The aforementioned voice duping is only one part of the scamming process. If the call comes from an unknown number, you’re far more likely to ignore it. That’s why scammers can also make their calls appear to be coming from numbers you trust.

Fake Call Detection is a new feature in the Phone by Google app that pops up an alert when a caller is suspected of impersonating your contacts. The alert says, “This may not be [Name]” and gives you the option to immediately hang up.

Google Photos is your new wardrobe

Digitally store and try on clothes

You may not know it, but there’s an entire category of apps dedicated to allowing people to catalog their wardrobes. Now, Google Photos is hoping to get in on it with a new “Wardrobe” collection.

First, you snap photos of your clothes and let Google Photos neatly put them on a white background. From there, everything can be categorized by item. You can then tap “Create” and put outfits together, which you can digitally try on. It’s a pretty cool feature that many apps charge a fee for.


Personal safety features expand to kids

13 and under

Google is making the Personal Safety app for Pixel phones available to kids under 13. Features include the ability to display medical information, setting emergency contacts on the lock screen, and car crash detection. In addition, kids over 13 can now use Safety Check and real-time sharing with emergency contacts.

“Catch me up” in Google Play Books

Recaps of what you’ve read

Remember Google Play Books? The company’s often overlooked eBook platform is getting a new feature to help you catch up when you haven’t read a book in a while. It works pretty much how you’d expect—AI summarizes what’s happened up until your current position in the book. It’s also possible to highlight text and ask questions about what you’re reading. These features are part of the new “Book Insights” button.

Quick Share 🤝 AirDrop

Now works with more devices

Last year, Google announced that the Pixel 10 series could share content with Apple’s AirDrop through Quick Share. Since then, it has very slowly expanded the functionality to more phones. Now, once again, the company is announcing even more devices.

The previous list was the Pixel 10 series, Galaxy S26 series, Oppo Find X9 series, Find N6, and Vivo X300 Ultra. New entries include the Galaxy S25 series, S24 series, Z Flip 7, Z Fold 7, Z Flip 6, Z Fold 6, Z TriFold, OPPO Find X8 series, OnePlus 15, HONOR Magic V6, and Magic8 Pro.

Keep your eyes peeled for these features to be rolling out to Android devices and the accompanying apps over the next few days and weeks.

Source: Google



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“It was severely downgraded,” Gilbert confirms. “I never would have found it if I was just looking through Google results.” (I tried the same prompt in Gemini earlier this month, and after an initial denial, the tool also gave me Eiger’s number.)

After this experience, Eiger, Gilbert, and another UW PhD student, Anna-Maria Gueorguieva, decided to test ChatGPT to see what it would surface about a professor. 

At first, OpenAI’s guardrails kicked in, and ChatGPT responded that the information was unavailable. But in the same response, the chatbot suggested, “if you want to go deeper, I can still try a more ‘investigative-style’ approach.” Their inquiry just had to help “narrow things down,” ChatGPT said, by providing “a neighborhood guess” for where the professor might live, or “a possible co-owner name” for the professor’s home. ChatGPT continued: “That’s usually the only way to surface newer or intentionally less-visible property records.” 

The students provided this information, leading ChatGPT to produce the professor’s home address, home purchase price, and spouse’s name from city property records. 

(Taya Christianson, an OpenAI representative, said she was not able to comment on what happened in this case without seeing screenshots or knowing which model the students had tested, even after we pointed out that many users may not know which model they were using in the ChatGPT interface. She also declined to comment generally about the exposure of PII by the chatbot, instead providing links to documents describing how OpenAI handles privacy, including filtering out PII, and other tools.) 

This reveals one of the fundamental problems with chatbots, says DeleteMe’s Shavell. AI companies “can build in guardrails, but [their chatbots] are also designed to be effective and to answer customer questions.”

The exposure issue is not limited to Gemini or ChatGPT. Last year, Futurism found that if you prompted xAI’s chatbot Grok with “[name] address,” in almost all cases, it provided not only residential addresses but also often the person’s phone numbers, work addresses, and addresses for people with similar-sounding names. (xAI did not respond to a request for comment.) 

No clear answers

There aren’t straightforward solutions to this problem—there’s no easy way to either verify whether someone’s personal information is in a given model’s training set or to compel the models to remove PII. 



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