When Google added photo scanning technology to Android phones, it caused a huge backlash, with the company accused of “secretly” installing new monitoring technology on Android phones “without user permission.”

At the time, Google assured me that SafetyCore was an enabling framework and would not actually start scanning photos or other content. The new app, it said, “provides on-device infrastructure for securely and privately performing classification to help users detect unwanted content. Users control SafetyCore, and SafetyCore only classifies specific content when an app requests it through an optionally enabled feature.”