Android’s Private Compute Services app will soon show a log of all its own network activity through a new preference in Private Compute Core settings (AKA “Android System Intelligence” under Settings > Security & privacy > More security & privacy on Pixel). This isn’t available yet.
What network activity can you expect to see in the log? ML model downloads for:
- App Suggestions
- Cinematic wallpaper
- Live Caption
- Live to Translate
- Notification Auto Expiration
- People & Conversations Service
- Quick Tap
- Speech recognition
- Suspicious Message Alerts
- Smart Copy/Paste
- Smart Text Selection
- Text classification
- Universal search
As well as Android Key Attestation nonce challenges (new) and any contributions to analytics for numerous services. Most of the features/services I mentioned aren’t new, except for 3: Cinematic wallpaper, Notification Auto Expiration, and Android Key Attestation in PCC.
1) Under the hood, the new Cinematic Wallpaper feature uses an “on-device convolutional neural network to estimate depth, and then a generative adversarial network for in-painting as the background moves,” according to Dave Burke at I/O.
2) We have never heard of a Notification Auto Expiration feature before, but it sounds like a feature that might automatically dismiss certain notifications based on certain criteria/time? If you know more info, let me know!
3) It looks like Private Compute Core will be handling Android Key Attestation, and anytime a nonce challenge is requested, this will also be logged in the network usage log mentioned before.
