Your Pixel Can Now Detect Malicious Apps on Your Phone
One of the challenges of digital life is avoiding malicious apps. You think the app is intriguing so you download it on your phone, but later you discover that some hacker is using it to inject malware into your device. Now you have an attacker viewing your sensitive information and new trust issues with the Google Play Store. Lose-lose.
Malicious apps are found on the Play Store more often than you think. This year alone, Lifehacker covered stories about Android apps containing malware once in February , twice in May , and once in September . Although Google has many security systems that try to weed out these malicious apps before they gain a foothold in the Play Store (Google Play Protect), hackers find a way, so users should be vigilant when downloading new apps on their devices.
Real-time threat detection will detect malicious apps on your Pixel
While it’s still important to be careful about the apps you choose to install, the responsibility for security shifts a bit back to Android. In a blog post on Wednesday , Google announced that its real-time threat detection feature is finally coming to Google Play Protect. First announced at Google I/O back in May , the threat detection system looks for malicious apps on your Android device by analyzing app activity patterns. This new approach should help detect applications that hide their malicious activity or remain invisible until it is time to act stealthily.
Google says that at launch, live threat detection is focused on “stalkerware,” a type of malware that scrapes your personal and sensitive data without your knowledge or consent. However, the company will be exploring ways to detect other types of malware and malicious activity, so this feature could detect even more programs in the future.
If Google Play Protect detects an app it deems suspicious, it will send you a real-time alert, something like “Unsafe app detected: [app name] may put your device at risk.” From here, you can determine whether the app seems suspicious or not, and if so, remove it from your device. It’s all powered by Private Compute Core , which Google says allows the company to monitor users’ privacy and security without collecting user data.
Real-time threat detection currently works on Pixel 6 and later phones. However, Google will roll out the feature to Android devices from other manufacturers “in the coming months.”
Google is also introducing a fraud detection system using artificial intelligence.
In the same blog post announcing real-time threat detection, Google also said it was launching a public beta for AI-powered fraud detection for Pixel 6 and newer models. This feature will work when you’re currently on a call: if Android detects a common scam tactic from another caller, it will send you an alert that it’s a likely scam. You can click “End Call” in the pop-up window to instantly boot the potential scammer. Google says this feature is disabled by default, and if you choose to use it, all the AI processing happens on the device, so Google doesn’t actually use any of your data to make it work.