Alongside the release of their ‘Fighting Scams in Search Report’, Google have shared how Chrome, Search and Android are using AI-powered technologies to defend users against online scams.
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This week, a Google blog highlighted the organisation’s role across AI advancements during the past decade and how they intend to “protect you from online scams where malicious actors deceive users to gain access to money, personal information, or both.”
Google reveal they have invested in their AI-powered scam detection systems, as well as made improvements to their classifiers across Search.
The Big Tech is now able to analyse vast quantities of text on the web, identify coordinated scam campaigns and detect emerging threats.
This has enabled them to “catch 20-times the number of scammy pages. These improvements help ensure the results you get are legitimate, and protect you from harmful sites trying to steal your sensitive data.”
Google Chrome now also uses Gemini Nano, an on-device large language model (LLM) on desktop, to provide users with an additional layer of defense against online scams and keeping them “twice as safe from phishing and other scams versus our Standard Protection mode.”
The on-device approach provides instant insight on risky websites and allows protection against “scams that haven’t been seen before.”
Google express that a LLM is appropriate for this “because of its ability to distill the varied, complex nature of websites, helping us adapt to new scam tactics more quickly.” They are already using this AI-powered approach to protect users from remote tech support scams.
Beyond the website, Google are also launching AI-powered warnings for Chrome on Android. “When Chrome’s on-device machine learning model flags a notification, you’ll receive a warning with the option to either unsubscribe or view the content that was blocked. And if you decide the warning was shown incorrectly, you can choose to allow future notifications from that website.”
Google continued: “Scams are commonly being initiated through phone calls and text messages that appear harmless at first, but then evolve into dangerous situations. We recently launched on-device AI-powered Scam Detection in Google Messages and Phone by Google to protect Android users from these types of sophisticated scams.”
