this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2023
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When I get a message in signal that that it has specific wording that would make someone think that it's a task then I get a notification to save it to keep how is Google doing this are they reading my signal my messages

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[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think that is a feature of Google Assistant or some other Google product. It reads everything you have on your screen at any moment to give you "smart" help like easy opening of addresses or phone numbers.

also your keyboard might be leaking data too

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That's why I disabled network access for my keyboard.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

That doesn't prevent it. Keyboard is tied to many core OS processes that connect to Google servers and relay that information. I would recommend replacing it with OpenBoard which is based on Android Open Source Project.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

If your referring to GBoard with network perms disabled, its highly unlikely that its using IPC as keylogger. There would be way too much useless data to store and not useful. Theoretically if they were to be a keylogger, the user would have to be in a super high threat model bracket for them to do this, but there no evidence of Google ever doing this.

Also OpenBoard hasn't been updated since August 2022. I recommend using the OpenBoard Fork.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There would be way too much useless data to store and not useful.

Not really. They have so much data about people's habbits and usage patterns that it's easy to discard bad data with machine learning. And I have no idea if they log everything, but there is no reason why they couldn't. That's enough of a risk factor to consider not using it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There's no evidence of them actually doing this and if they were to do it, its most likely detectable via reverse engineering.

Keep in mind setting the internet permission on gboard then giving other google apps internet access is privacy theatre. This applies to Google certified devices as well because Google Play Services are privileged.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Well aware of that. Don't have Google Play Services on my phone.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Every other keyboard is awful by comparison. I've tried them all.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago

Assuming this is on an android phone with the normal Google Play Services on it then you should expect that Google can theoretically read anything that appears on it. It's probably not that sinister though, I don't imagine anything is being sent away and logged (though it theoretically could be!), there's probably just some process which reads every incoming notification and if it thinks it sounds like a task then it offers you the prompt. Is this some setting you haven't disabled in Google Assistant?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I believe signal uses google to push the notifications and if its giving you the option to add it to google keep the phone obviously know what it is the message content.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

While Signal does use Google's notification system, my understanding is that they just use it as a way to wake up the app on the phone and have it check for new messages rather than sending any message content this way. The notification system that the operating system provides on the phone would still have access to the message data in the locally generated message notification with the actual content however, along with any apps that you give access to your notifications.

It may be something like Android System Intelligence or another similar service doing it: https://support.google.com/pixelphone/answer/12112173?hl=en

Notification management: Adds action buttons to notifications. For example, the action buttons could add directions to a place, help you track a package, or add a contact.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Very interesting thank you for the insight!

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Does the message contents pop up in the new message notification?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

yeah notification contents are not private, google tries to do fun stuff based on notification bubbles.

Turn off message contents in your notifications and the problem should stop

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

I don't have an answer but I can't imagine this isn't something Signal is aware of and would sound alarms if Google was collecting your message contents.