Latest news with #AndroidOpenSourceProject
Forbes
22-04-2025
- Forbes
Google Starts Scanning Your Photos—3 Billion Users Must Now Decide
Big brother is here. getty When Google added photo scanning technology to Android phones, it caused a huge backlash, with the company accused of 'secretly' installing new monitoring technology on Android phones 'without user permission.' At the time, Google assured me that SafetyCore was an enabling framework and would not actually start scanning photos or other content. The new app, it said, '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.' Well that time has now come and it starts with Google Messages. As reported by 9to5Google, 'Google Messages is rolling out Sensitive Content Warnings that blur nude images on Android.' Not only does it blur content, but it also warns that such imagery can be harmful and provides options to view explicit content or block numbers. This AI scanning takes place on device, and Google also assures that nothing is sent back to them. Android hardener GrapheneOS backed up that claim: 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.' AI photo monitoring is here 9to5Google But GrapheneOS also lamented 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.' Back to that secrecy point, again. The Google Messages update was expected. The question now is what comes next. And the risk is that the capability is being introduced at the same time as secure, encrypted user content is under increasing pressure from legislators and security agencies around the world. Each time such technology is introduced, privacy advocates push back. For now the feature is disabled by default for adults but enabled by default for children. Adults can decide to enable the new safety measures in Google Messages Settings, under Protection & Safety— Manage sensitive content warnings. Depending on a child's age, their settings can only be changed in either their account settings or Family Link. This doesn't end here, and so just as with Gmail and other platforms, Google's 3 billion Android, email and other users will need to decide what level of AI scanning, monitoring and analysis they're comfortable with and where they draw the line. This is on-device, but many of the new updates don't have that same privacy protection. AI monitoring is here to stay and will take some getting used to. As Phone Arena points out, the new photo scanning 'also works in reverse; if you try to send or forward an image that might be considered sensitive, Messages will flash a heads-up to let you know what you're about to share, and you'll have to confirm before it goes through.' Welcome to the brave new world of 'big brother' AI.
Yahoo
08-02-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Why the 'spirit' of open source means much more than a license
Arguments about what is and isn't "open source" are often resolved by deferring to the Open Source Initiative (OSI): If a piece of software is available under a license rubber stamped as "open source" by the OSI's formal "definition," then that software is open source. But waters muddy when you get into the nuts and bolts of legal definitions versus the "spirit" of what open source really means. Indeed, there is significant nuance in the open source versus proprietary software debate: Has an "open source company" hamstrung its project by sliding core features behind a commercial paywall? How much transparency is there around the project's development? And how much direct input does the "community" really have in a given project? To many, open source is not just about the legal ability to use and modify code; the culture, transparency, and governance around it is paramount. Everyone knows about the Google-flavored version of Android that ships on smartphones and tablets, replete with an array of apps and services. The underlying Android Open Source Project (AOSP), released under a permissive Apache 2.0-license, is available for anyone to access, "fork," and modify for their own hardware projects. Android, by just about any definition, is about as open source as it gets. And Google has used this fact in its defense against anti-competition criticism, noting that Amazon has reappropriated Android for its own lineup of Fire-branded devices. But all this ignores separate "anti-fragmentation agreements" Google signed with hardware makers that restrict them from using forked versions of Android. And unlike something like Kubernetes that sits under an independent foundation with a diverse range of corporate and community contributors, Android sits under the direct control of Google without a great deal of transparency over roadmap or community input. "Android, in a license sense, is perhaps the most well-documented, perfectly open 'thing' that there is," Luis Villa, co-founder and general counsel at Tidelift, said in a panel discussion at the State of Open Con25 in London this week. "All the licenses are exactly as you want them — but good luck getting a patch into that, and good luck figuring out when the next release even is." This gets to the crux of the debate: Open source can be something of an illusion. A lack of real independence can mean a lack of agency for those who would like to properly get involved in a project. It can also raise questions about a project's long-term viability, evidenced by the countless open source companies that have switched licenses to protect their commercial interests. "If you think about the practical accessibility of open source, it goes beyond the license, right?" Peter Zaitsev, founder of open source database services company Percona, said in the panel discussion. "Governance is very important, because if it's a single corporation, they can change a license like 'that.'" These sentiments were echoed in a separate talk by Dotan Horovits, open source evangelist at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), where he mused about open source "turning to the dark side." He noted that in most cases, issues arise when a single-vendor project decides to make changes based on its own business needs among other pressures. "Which begs the question, is vendor-owned open source an oxymoron?" Horovits said. "I've been asking this question for a good few years, and in 2025 this question is more relevant than ever." These debates won't be going anywhere anytime soon, as open source has emerged as a major focal point in the AI realm. China's DeepSeek arrived with a bang off the back of open source hype, and while the models' MIT licenses are very much recognized as open source, there remains black holes around training data among other components. Which is why researchers at Hugging Face are trying to create an even "more open" version of DeepSeek's reasoning model. Meta, meanwhile, has long tooted its open source horn with regards to its Llama-branded large language models (LLMs), even though Llama isn't open source by most estimations — the models, while perhaps more "open" than others, have commercial restrictions. "I have my quibbles and concerns about the open source AI definition, but it's really clear that what Llama is doing isn't open source," Villa said. Emily Omier, a consultant for open source businesses and host of the Business of Open Source podcast, added that such attempts to "corrupt" the meaning behind "open source" is testament to its inherent power. "It goes to show how strong the brand of open source is — the fact that people are trying to corrupt it, means that people care," Omier said during the panel discussion. Much of this may be for regulatory reasons, however. The EU AI Act has a special carve-out for "free and open source" AI systems (aside from those deemed to pose an "unacceptable risk"). And Villa says this goes some way toward explaining why a company might want to rewrite the rulebook on what "open source" actually means. "There are plenty of actors right now who, because of the brand equity [of open source] and the regulatory implications, want to change the definition, and that's terrible," Villa said. While there are clear arguments for applying additional criteria that incorporates the "spirit" of what open source is intended to be all about, having clear parameters — as defined by a license — keeps things simple and less subject to nuanced subjectivity. How much community engagement would be necessary for something to be truly "open source"? On a practical and legal level, keeping the definition limited to the license makes sense. Stefano Maffulli, executive director at the OSI, said that while some organizations and foundations do lean into ideas around "open design, community, and development," these are all fundamentally philosophical concepts. "The point of having definitions is to have criteria that can be scored, and focusing on licensing is how that is accomplished," Maffulli said in a statement issued to TechCrunch. "The global community and industry have come to rely on the Open Source Definition and now the Open Source AI Definition as objective measures that they can rely on." Sign in to access your portfolio
