Why YSK:

You may like these features or find them creepy, but the app doesn’t have direct network access.

Android System Intelligence is a system app on Android that is responsible for a whole host of smart features, including Live Caption, Live Translate, Now Playing, Smart Auto-rotate, and more. The app can be disabled or uninstalled at the cost of losing these features.

Personally I don’t enjoy having a Google app watching and listening all the time, so it was easy to disable it and ease my anxiety. (This doesn’t stop Google from being Google, but it does turn these features on or off, depending on whether they are useful or not)

  • Skull giver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl
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    5 months ago

    This has been in Android for a while now. I don’t know why you’d disable it unless it’s draining your battery; the whole point is to do all of the data processing on-device. If Google wants to listen in, they don’t need the AI coprocessor app to do it, they can just have Play Services do it directly.

    As for privacy: just because an app doesn’t have internet permissions, doesn’t mean it can’t exfiltrate data. For example, Google documents that the service collects a device ID and analytics, probably transmitted through Play Services.

    You can (should) disable analytics collection, of course. Sounds like a better deal to me.