Per one tech forum this week: “Google has quietly installed an app on all Android devices called ‘Android System SafetyCore’. It claims to be a ‘security’ application, but whilst running in the background, it collects call logs, contacts, location, your microphone, and much more making this application ‘spyware’ and a HUGE privacy concern. It is strongly advised to uninstall this program if you can. To do this, navigate to 'Settings’ > 'Apps’, then delete the application.”
SafetyCore Placeholder so if it ever tries to reinstall itself it will fail due to signature mismatch.
I struggle with GitHub sometimes. It says to download the apk but I don’t see it in the file list. Anyone care to point me in the right direction?
Click on the “releases” link
Under the end of the readme, the section labelled releases.
Got it, thanks!
At the bottom of the page, it says releases - click on the release that’s there, and that’s where you’ll find the all.
I haven’t been able to install it though due to signature mismatch, I’m not sure why…
Awesome, thanks! You didn’t install a previous version did you? Apparently you can’t update to the current version due to the signature issue.
There’s an app called obtainium that let’s you link the main page of github apps and manages both the download, the instalation and the updates of those apps.
Great if you want the latest software directly from the source.
Love me some Obtainium. Did my first PR this week (adding cross-device sync via SxncD)
I didn’t understand the value of fdroid all since it feels like a web wrapper. Thanks to you finally pulled the trigger on Obtanium. Omg that’s simple af
It’s a web wrapper that points to a non-Google software repo.
The non-Google software repo is the important part, the interface can be bad as long as it can install software.
I use Obtanium too, but fDroid is my first stop when I need an app. Google’s Play store is a last resort.
Droid-ify and Neo-Store are alternative clients for the F-Droid repository (and other repos), that you may like better than the official client. But yeah, Obtainium is indeed simple and it’s powerful if you already know exactly which app you want to install (rather than searching for relevant options in some repositories).
Thanks! Til
Scroll down to releases.
Got it, thanks!
Amazing, thank you. I have uninstalled this bs twice now and have so far been spared by another force install. I hope this works
Wow that’s actually genius thank you
And what exactly does the github App do?
Is suppose it’s not the same as the Google App?
It doesn’t do anything. The only reason to consider installing it is that this is cryptographically signed by another developer, so if Google tries to install safety core again, it will fail because googled signature is different. It also has a super high version number, so that Google hopefully will not think to try to install the software.
Thank you for sharing!
Gimme Linux phone, I’m ready for it.
if there was something that could run android apps virtualized, I’d switch in a heartbeat
Do you mean sandboxed?
not necessarily… I mean If they run under the same VM, I’d be fine with that as well…but having a sandboxed wrapper would for sure be nice.
Every one of them can, AFAIK. I have a second cheap used phone I picked up to play with Ubuntu Touch and it has a system called Waydroid for this. Not quite seamless and you’ll want to use native when possible but it does work.
SailfishOS, PostmarketOS, Mobian, etc all also can use Waydroid or a similar thing
Waydroid?
To be clear, I haven’t used it at all and have no idea how well it works.
Tried it on my laptop. Doesn’t work at all
Bummer
I gave it a run on Ubuntu touch with a fair phone like 8 months ago… It was still pretty rough then.
I remember reading recently that it’s gotten better (haven’t tried myself so don’t hold me to it). I can say that Wayland in general has come a long way since I switched to Linux ~2 years ago
I have used Waydroid, mainly with FOSS apps, and although it has some rough edges, it does often work for just having one or two Android apps functionality.
Linux on mobile as a whole isn’t daily driver ready yet in my opinion. I’ve only tried pmOS on a OP6, but that seems to be a leading project on a well-supported phone (compared to the rest).
There are two solutions for that. One is Waydroid, which is basically what you’re describing. Another is android_translation_layer, which is closer to WINE in that it translates API calls to more native Linux ones, although that project is still in the alpha stages.
You can try both on desktop Linux if you’d like. Just don’t expect to run apps that require passing SafetyNet, like many banking apps.
I know about WayDroid, but never heard of ATL.
So yeah, while we have the fundamentals, we still don’t have an OS that’s stable enough as a daily driver on phones.
And this isn’t a Linux issue. It’s mostly because of proprietary drivers. GrapheneOS already has the issue that it only works on Pixel phones.
I can imagine, bringing a Linux only mobile OS to life is even harder. I wish android phones were designed in a way, that there is a driver layer and an OS layer, with standerdized APIs to simply swap the OS layer for any unix-like system.
Halium is basically what you’re talking about. It uses the Android HAL to run Linux.
The thing is, that also uses the Android kernel, meaning that there will essentially never be a kernel update since the kernel patches by Qualcomm have a ton of technical debt. The people working on porting mainline Linux to SoCs are essentially rewriting everything from scratch.
I just gave up and pre-ordered the Light Phone 3. Anytime I truly need a mobile app, I can just use an old iPhone and a WiFi connection.
The Firefox Phone should’ve been a real contender. I just want a browser in my pocket that takes good pictures and plays podcasts.
Unfortunately Mozilla is going the enshittification route more and more. Or good in this case that the Firefox Phone did not take of.
Is there some good Chromium browser with hardware video decoder support and a working adblocker, that is not Brave? Or which Firefox fork is recommended?
deleted by creator
I’m sticking with Gecko for sure. Trying out Waterfox over the weekend on desktop, and Fennec F-Droid on my phone.
cromite for chrome, and ironfox for firefox?
too bad firefox is going through the way like google, they are updating thier privacy terms of usage.
Yep. I’m furious at Mozilla right now. But when the Firefox Phone was in development, they were one of the web’s heroes.
it says its only for LLM? as long as they dont try to expand the “privacy” in any case i download alternatives to the browsers anyways.
I’m mostly just frustrated that the best option has now become merely the lesser evil.
Google says that SafetyCore “provides on-device infrastructure for securely and privately performing classification to help users detect unwanted content. Users control SafetyCore, and SafetyCore only classifies specific content when an app requests it through an optionally enabled feature.”
GrapheneOS — an Android security developer — provides some comfort, that SafetyCore “doesn’t provide client-side scanning used to report things to Google or anyone else. It provides on-device machine learning models usable by applications to classify content as being spam, scams, malware, etc. This allows apps to check content locally without sharing it with a service and mark it with warnings for users.”
But GrapheneOS also points out that “it’s unfortunate that it’s not open source and released as part of the Android Open Source Project and the models also aren’t open let alone open source… We’d have no problem with having local neural network features for users, but they’d have to be open source.” Which gets to transparency again.
Graphene could easily allow for open source solutions to emulate the SafetyCore interface. Like how it handles Google’s location services.
There’s plenty of open source libraries and models for running local AI, seems like this is something that could be easily replicated in the FOSS world.
Fuck these cunt
Thanks for posting, I just uninstalled
It didn’t appear in my apps list so I thought it wasn’t installed. But when I searched for the app name it appears. So be aware.
How did you search for it? Search bar in settings?
On my settings screen I have a search bar at the top
Tried that, found nothing.
you can look it up on your app managment settings too, search for it there.
Found nothing
Play Store, it doesn’t show in local search results, but they list it as installed.
Even worse, i found this comment in the app store and it did the same on my device :
Installed automatically without my knowledge, no notification, only found it because of a friend’s post, and even then, you only see it through a link, it doesn’t come up in your app list or a search of the Google play store. I thought it felt like my battery was draining a little quicker too, which is apparently also something noticed in connection to having this app. Uninstalling.
The app can be found here :
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.safetycore
.Oh right, maybe I noticed because of Storage Isolation, that’s an app which allows you to restrict folder access of other apps, and it prompts me to select actions for every newly installed app. So it casually prompts me whenever google pushes a new, hidden installation.
i believe this application hides in different ways on different devices and maybe it is also different by regions making it even worse to detect and explain to someone else. So, i wouldn’t be surprised if you told me you found it in a different way than how it was explained in my comment.
.
also in the Forbes article :
Per one tech forum (
https://gbatemp.net/threads/psa-to-all-android-users-google-quietly-installs-spyware-on-android-devices.667542/GBAtemp.net - The Independent Video Game Community
)
this week: “Google has quietly installed an app on all Android devices called ‘Android System SafetyCore’. It claims to be a ‘security’ application, but whilst running in the background, it collects call logs, contacts, location, your microphone, and much more making this application ‘spyware’ and a HUGE privacy concern. It is strongly advised to uninstall this program if you can.… →
Remove the following 2 spywares :
1).
Android System SafetyCore: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.safetycore
2).
Android System Key Verifier: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.contactkeysYep, I’ve removed both of those the second they showed up on my phone uninvited. Even as a non-US citizen, with the current state of their government, I definitely don’t want any corporate collecting data on myself.
i was able to find it on my oneplus, and i also noticed, why is my oneplus 12r draining so fast?
Google harvesting all your data for profits. I’m shocked. Shocked I say.
Kind of weird that they are installing this dependency whether you will enable those planned scanning features or not. Here is an article mentioning that future feature Sensitive Content Warnings. It does sound kind of cool, less chance to accidentally send your dick pic to someone I guess.
Sensitive Content Warnings is an optional feature that blurs images that may contain nudity before viewing, and then prompts with a “speed bump” that contains help-finding resources and options, including to view the content. When the feature is enabled, and an image that may contain nudity is about to be sent or forwarded, it also provides a speed bump to remind users of the risks of sending nude imagery and preventing accidental shares.
All of this happens on-device to protect your privacy and keep end-to-end encrypted message content private to only sender and recipient. Sensitive Content Warnings doesn’t allow Google access to the contents of your images, nor does Google know that nudity may have been detected. This feature is opt-in for adults, managed via Android Settings, and is opt-out for users under 18 years of age.
Looks like more of a chance of false positives happening and getting the police to raid your home to confiscate your devices. I don’t care what the article says I know Google is getting access to that data because that’s who they are.
Just for verifying accuracy and improving the product.
Thank you was able to find and uninstall the app with no issues
Samsung? I was able to on my s23ultra
Hope they like all my dick pics
Don’t worry they won’t!
/Burn
Samsung lets me uninstall it now problem.
Great, it’ll have to plow through ~30GB of 1080p recordings of darkness and my upstairs neighbors living it up in the AMs. And nothing else.
Is there any indication that Apple is truly more secure and privacy conscious over Android? Im kinda tired of Google and their oversteps.
For true privacy you’ll want something like GrapheneOS on a Pixel, with no Google apps or anything. Some other ROM with no gApps as a second choice.
Other than that, Apple SEEMS to be mildly better. I’ll give you an example: Apple pulls encryption feature from UK over government spying demands
While it’s a bad thing that they pull the encryption feature, it’s a good sign - they either aren’t willing or able to add a backdoor for the UK security services. Then there was this case. If the article is to be believed, they started working on security as of iOS 8 so they could no longer comply with government requests. Today we’re on iOS 18.
Apple claims their advertising ID is anonymized so third party apps don’t know who you are. That said, they still have the advertising ID service so Apple themselves do know a whoooooole lot about you - but this is the same with Google.
Then regarding photo scanning - Apple received a LOT of backlash for their proposed photo scanning feature. But it was going to be only on-device scans on photos that were going to be uploaded to iCloud (so disabling iCloud would disable it too) and it was only going to report you if you had a LOT of child pornography on your phone - otherwise it was, supposedly, going to do absolutely nothing about the photos. It wasn’t even supposed to be a categorization model, just a “Does this match known CSAM?” filter. Google and Microsoft had already implemented something similar, except they didn’t scan your shit on-device.
At the end of the day, Apple might be a bit more private, but it’s a wash. It’s not transparent and neither is Google. I like using their devices. Sometimes I miss the freedom of custom ROMs, but my damn banking apps stopped working on Lineage and I couldn’t be arsed to start using the banks’ mobile websites again like I’d done in the past. So I moved to iOS, as Oneplus had completely botched their Android experience in the meantime while I’d been using Lineage so I was kinda pissed at what I had considered one of the last remaining decent Android manufacturers (Sonys are overpriced and I will never own a Samsung, I hate them, I didn’t like my Huawei or Xiaomi much either).
So if you want to run custom ROMs, get a Pixel or something. If not, Apple is as good a choice as Android. A couple of years ago it was the better choice even, as you’d get longer software support, but now the others have started catching up due to all the consumer outrage.
Thanks for the detailed reply dude. This is so thorough.
The short answer is: Apple collects much of the same data as any other modern tech composite, but their “walled garden” strategy means that for the most part only THEY have access to that info.
It’s technically lower risk since fewer parties have access to the data, but philosophically just about equally as bad because they aren’t doing this out of any real love for privacy (despite what their marketing department might claim)
Basically, ot scans all files and shit like an antivirus does on windows? Oks
No, antivirus software only looks for matches with known malware and exploits.
So, kinda like a free malware software that just scans without doing anything to solve the problem
Thnx for this, just uninstalled it, google are arseholes
