Android users were shocked last year to find Android System SafetyCore installed on their devices without consent, silently “scanning” content. Google is now developing an API that makes the content classification functionality available to third-party apps.
Cybernews looked into what SafetyCore does, the new Content Safety Manager API, and whether malicious apps or spyware could abuse it to scan for sensitive images.
Key findings:
- SafetyCore performs image classification on the device to prevent users from seeing nudity when they receive, send, or forward messages in Google Messages.
- Google states that this feature doesn’t send identifiable data or any classified content or results to Google’s servers.
- Android just introduced a new API for developers – Content Safety Manager. It uses the on-device content safety service to classify content and exposes this functionality to app creators.
- The API can accept images but also other media types, and returns four broad types: allowed / warning / blocked / unclassified.
- Google doesn’t have complete control over what third-party apps do with the data.
- Combined with excessive permissions, a malicious app could abuse the content-scanning capability to inspect large amounts of user content. This could lead to privacy-invasive profiling, or much worse – exfiltrating sensitive photos or other private data, and potentially even demanding a ransom.
- According to Google Play Store, Android System SafetyCore has over 1 billion downloads and an average score of 3.6 stars from nearly 240,000 reviews.
Here’s the full article: https://cybernews.com/security/android-content-safety-manager-api-privacy-concerns/
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This entry was posted on August 24, 2026 at 8:22 am and is filed under Commentary with tags Cybernews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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Android’s nude-scanning app keeps reinstalling itself – and Google is opening access to other developers
Android users were shocked last year to find Android System SafetyCore installed on their devices without consent, silently “scanning” content. Google is now developing an API that makes the content classification functionality available to third-party apps.
Cybernews looked into what SafetyCore does, the new Content Safety Manager API, and whether malicious apps or spyware could abuse it to scan for sensitive images.
Key findings:
Here’s the full article: https://cybernews.com/security/android-content-safety-manager-api-privacy-concerns/
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This entry was posted on August 24, 2026 at 8:22 am and is filed under Commentary with tags Cybernews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.