Google Messages may extend its nudity-scanning photo filter to also work on video (APK teardown)
TL;DR Last year Google announced Sensitive Content Warnings for Messages.
The opt-in system runs on-device and can detect nudity in still images.
Google now appears to be working to extend this system to also work on video content.
Modern communication truly is a double-edged sword, and for as easy as it makes it for us to keep in contact with our loved ones, privately sharing all the important details of our lives, these systems can make it just as easy for someone we don't want to hear from to reach out with some particularly disturbing content. It's for reasons like this that last year Google announced Sensitive Content Warnings for Messages, an on-device tool for scanning media and alerting you in advance of any potential nudity. After seeing that start to go live this spring, we're now checking out what could be the next evolution it's getting ready to take.
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An APK teardown helps predict features that may arrive on a service in the future based on work-in-progress code. However, it is possible that such predicted features may not make it to a public release.
Sensitive Content Warnings are designed to help limit the unwanted proliferation of nude images, but with RCS now in wide deployment, users can send each other a lot more than just still pics. As we look into Google's new messages.android_20250719_00_RC00.phone_samsung_openbeta_dynamic build of Messages, we've uncovered some evidence that has us thinking about how this system could extend to also apply to video:
Code Copy Text video Video may contain nudity
As you may remember from a teardown we did while first waiting for the option to go live, 'Spatula' is Google's codename for Sensitive Content Warnings, and the value of that second string here makes perfectly clear that we're still looking for the same thing.
AssembleDebug / Android Authority
Right now, this is all we have to go on, and we haven't yet been able to actually get Messages to process video through SafetyCore to scan for nudity. That said, this pretty transparently feels like it's headed in that direction, and we'd suspect that it's only a matter of time before we have something along that line to share with you. After all, Sensitive Content Warnings for photos are a good start, but there's a lot more media out there that could be full of unwanted nudity. Hopefully we'll soon have the tools to stay on top of all of it.
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