If you’ve ever been irritated by spam messages, Google has some good news for you. The tech giant is upgrading its spam protection features in Google Voice, making it easier to identify and manage spam SMS messages. The update, initially reported by 9to5Google, is available for both Android and iOS users.

The feature is coming to both Android and iOS devices

The new feature in Google Voice automatically marks messages suspected to be spam. If a message falls under this category, you’ll see a red exclamation mark on the profile avatar and the message preview will start with ‘Suspected spam.’ Once you see this label, you have two options: you can either confirm it as spam, sending future messages from that number straight to your spam folder, or mark it as not spam, preventing future messages from that number from being labeled as such.

This feature is available for Voice Starter, Standard, and Premier paid customers, as well as users with free personal accounts in the US. The rollout has begun and is expected to be available to everyone in the coming weeks.

Google’s primary goal is to protect users from unwanted messages and potential scams. The company utilizes advanced artificial intelligence technology that already flags billions of spam calls every month across its network to identify suspected spam messages.

That’s not all. Google has also introduced three more updates worth noting. First, hovering over someone’s people card in Google Contacts and various Google Workspace products will now show birthday decorations. If you’ve added your birthday to your Google Account and made it visible, you’ll also get these festive visuals on your special day. Second, in the Google Sheets iOS app, adding hyperlinks to cells has been simplified, enhancing the usability of the app. Lastly, if you’re utilizing Directory Sync, you can now directly place users from Azure Active Directory or Active Directory into a specific organizational unit on the Google Workspace side.

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(Via)

The post Google Voice is Upgrading Spam Protection to Manage Unwanted Messages appeared first on Gizmochina.

After half a year development, spam protection in Android messages finally started rolling out earlier this month to some users. The feature is yet to be made available to everyone which means the change may be server-side and limited for the meantime. However, we may see a full rollout sometime soon.

When the update gets to any Android phone, a new notifications will pop-up on the device showing the new spam protection. This new “spam protection” feature will also appear in the “Advanced” section of the settings menu (Settings -> Advanced), allowing users to manually activate or deactivate it.

A formerly discovered section of Google’s support help site that went live prematurely, gave an explanation about how the new spam protection feature will function from a privacy perspective. Stating that when this setting feature is enabled, some information about messages that are received on the device will automatically be sent to Google. Howbeit, the content of the message will not be read; such as the phone number or the message body.

How this spam protection feature works is undefined, but possibly it observes the data statistically to examine similarities between spam messages so as to detect them. If you forward a spam report manually to Google it still submits the phone numbers of both the sender and the recipient including the message body. If you are so concerned about privacy implications that might emanate, and having Google to access your Information, you might literally not be needing this feature, presumably using a different app might save you the stress.

(source)

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