Google has announced a bunch of new security features for Google Messages and Android, making it even harder for scammers to target users.
Google has been pretty vocal about how its anti-scam features on Android already help protect users from fraud, with the company even claiming that Android offers better scam protection than Apple’s iPhones. But Google isn’t stopping there, as it has now announced several new features designed to make Android even more secure.
The company today announced a new Enhanced Protection mode for Google Messages. Google says this optional security setting will offer its most advanced protection against sophisticated scams by using its most capable Gemini models in the cloud to better understand scammers’ intentions and detect threats that might otherwise go unnoticed.
Google says the analysis will take place using Private AI Compute, meaning the data is encrypted and processed in a secure environment that even Google cannot access. The company says this allows it to use more powerful AI models to detect scams without compromising users’ privacy.
Google is also improving link protection in Google Messages. The company says Gemini Nano will now work alongside real-time web signals to determine whether an unfamiliar link is trustworthy, helping users avoid potentially malicious websites before opening them.
And Google isn’t just improving what happens inside the Messages app. It’s also expanding scam warnings to the notification shade itself.
The company says its notification-based scam alerts, which were previously limited to Pixel phones, are now expanding to hundreds of millions of additional Android devices. This means users will be warned about potentially suspicious messages directly in their notifications, even before opening the texting app.
The feature is coming to phones from Honor, Infinix, itel, Motorola, Oppo, OnePlus, Realme, Tecno, vivo, Xiaomi, and other Android manufacturers.
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But perhaps one of the most useful additions announced today is improved protection during screen sharing. Android already offers some protection for sensitive information when sharing your screen, but Google is now expanding that functionality to Chrome and Android WebView as well.
This means sensitive information, such as login credentials, payment details, and other private data, will now be automatically hidden during live screen-sharing sessions. This could be particularly useful against scammers who trick users into sharing their screens and then guide them through banking apps or websites to steal sensitive information.
There is also improved call-forwarding protection coming to Android. The company says scammers sometimes try to enable call forwarding on a victim’s phone to intercept calls and one-time passcodes. With the new protection, Android will prevent apps from silently enabling call forwarding in the background.
And if a scammer tries to trick you into manually entering an MMI code through the phone dialer to enable call forwarding, Android will now display a proactive warning explaining the potential risk.
All in all, Google is adding several useful layers of protection to Android. The company has been pretty active on this front for a while now, but with AI making scams more sophisticated by the day, these new protections are becoming even more important.