Google announced its plans for rolling out AI tools that protect Chrome users from scams on Thursday. The company would make use of Gemini Nano, its on-device large language model (LLM) on desktop for this purpose. It’s also launching new AI-powered warnings for Chrome on Android to help users be aware of spam notifications.
Chrome’s Enhanced Protection mode of safe browsing offers the highest level of protection with twice the protection against phishing provided. Google claims that Gemini Nano would add on to the protection with an additional layer of defense. “Gemini Nano’s LLM is perfect for this use because of its ability to distill the varied, complex nature of websites, helping us adapt to new scam tactics more quickly,” Google said in a blog post.
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Google is already using AI-powered tools for defense against remote tech support claims. The company says it plans to extend this to Android devices and even more types of scams in the future.
Google also stated that the risk from scam sites can extend beyond the site itself through notifications if you have them enabled. Malicious websites can use notifications to try to scam you, which is why Chrome will now help you be aware of malicious, spammy, or misleading notifications on Android.
With Chrome’s AI defense tools, users receive a warning when Chrome’s on-device machine learning model flags a notification as possibly being a scam. They can then choose to either view or unsubscribe to the content that has been flagged.
As part of this announcement, Google mentioned that it has been using AI to stop scams in Search by detecting and blocking hundreds of millions of scammy results every day. The company also claimed its AI-powered scam detection systems have helped to catch 20 times more scammy pages.
There are also improvements coming to Google Messages and Phone by Google. These detect ongoing scams that start out innocently, but quickly evolve into dangerous situations, which might be hard for traditional scam-protection methods to spot.