Pixel users will soon get an extra layer of protection against malicious calls and texts, as Google’s AI-powered, real-time scam detection is rolling out widely next month.

The Gemini Nano feature, which is coming to both Google Messages and Phone by Google, runs in the background and will alert you mid-call if it identifies “conversation patterns commonly associated with scammers.” You’ll hear a beep at the beginning of possible scam calls to indicate that the conversation is being monitored, with subsequent beeps sounding every few minutes. You’ll also see an on-screen prompt when suspicious activity has been detected, with options to “End call” or mark “Not a scam.” For messages, possible scam texts will be automatically moved to your Spam & blocked folder.

Google says that the feature works on-device only and will not save or record any call or message content.

Google rolled out live threat detection for spotting malicious apps on your Pixel late last year (the same time that Scam Detection launched in a public beta). That feature alerts you to suspicious apps—specifically, “stalkerware” that scrapes your personal data—in real time so you can evaluate and delete them if needed.

How to enable scam detection on your Pixel

Once scam detection is widely available in March, you can activate the feature for calls in your settings. Open Phone by Google Settings > Scam Detection and toggle scam detection on. To enable detection and filtering for spam texts in Google Messages, go to Messages Settings > Spam protection.

Of course, threat and scam detection features don’t absolve users of the responsibility to follow basic security best practices when it comes to calls, messages, and apps. Be wary of calls and texts from numbers you don’t know, and don’t engage with anyone requesting urgent action, such as providing sensitive information, sending money, or downloading software or apps to your devices. Don’t click links in suspicious texts or emails, and always go directly to the website for the bank or institution to locate contact information.

Do you remember a time when the internet was a more chaotically personal place? When the experience of using social media wasn’t so uniform? SkySpace seeks to recapture those days. The site transforms your Bluesky profile into a Myspace-esque page, complete with backgrounds, music, and a section for your top eight friends. I kind of love it.

“I miss when social media was more about being social and less about media,” wrote Ste Curran, who built the site, in the project’s FAQ. “I miss the personality, the ugliness, the chaos, the feeling of planting a flag in tiny part of the internet and saying ‘this is mine’.”

And SkySpace certainly delivers there, allowing you to customize basically every aspect of your profile page. Choose any image on the web as your background—including animated GIFs—and tweak the fonts, color scheme, and borders. Add a song to your profile using a Spotify, Soundcloud, or Apple Music link. List your interests. There’s even a version of MySpace “friends”—complete with an optional top eight.

You can view the SkySpace version of any Bluesky profile, but most of them are boring. To make yours interesting you need to sign in—head to the Skyspace homepage, type your Bluesky handle in the top-right corner, then click “Log In”. You will be asked by Bluesky to authorize SkySpace; do that, and you’re in. You can now click the various edit buttons to really tweak your profile.

Credit: Justin Pot

You can link to any image on the web to add it to the background, then choose how the image will be positioned. You can choose the color of each panel, and its transparency. You can choose the thickness and style of the line around each panel. You can even change the text font and color. Hit Submit, and the change will stick.

(The way this happens is pretty interesting. Your options are actually turned into a Bluesky post as a reply. SkySpace doesn’t store any of your settings on its own servers—the service just scans profiles for relevant posts and renders the page using them. As the FAQ explains it: “When you edit a section the site creates a new post tagged with #skyspace and sends it as a reply to a dead account, @skyspacenull. That effectively hides each post from your followers but SkySpace can see them, parse them and turn them into something beautiful/horrific/beautiful to you.”)

Explore the rest of your page and tweak everything you can. You can add a quote, a location, blurbs, a song, and even a list of interests. All of this will feel vary familiar to MySpace veterans, as will the friends section at the bottom:

Credit: Justin Pot

This is populated entirely from your mutuals on Bluesky—people you follow who also follow you back. You can optionally choose which eight people show up here, bringing back the most important decisions one could make on the internet in 2005: Who deserves a spot in your top eight?

This site doesn’t really return us to the friendlier, simpler internet of two decades ago—if only!—but it’s a nice reminder of the chaos and customization we once took for granted. I recommend checking it out.

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Google just announced that its “loss of pulse dectection” feature for the Pixel Watch 3 has received FDA clearance and will be available to U.S. users by the end of March. Read on for more on what this feature does, how well it works (according to one early study), and how you’ll be able to enable it.

The feature has been available in several European countries since late 2024. According to a Google help page on the feature, it’s currently available in “Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom.” 

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What is “loss of pulse detection”? 

According to documents from Google, the feature is meant to sound an alarm and contact emergency services whenever the person wearing the watch loses their pulse. This could be from a heart attack, poisoning, overdose, or other cause of respiratory or circulatory failure, according to Google’s documents on what they had in mind when developing the feature. 

When the watch detects a “loss of pulse event” (it thinks you are wearing the watch but cannot detect a pulse with the regular heart rate sensor), the watch is programmed to do the following, in order: 

1. Perform additional checks (taking about 20 seconds) to be sure that it’s not detecting movement or a pulse. For example, it can use brighter lights in the optical heart rate sensor, and check for movement from accelerometers.

2. Buzz your wrist and ask if you are OK. You can tap an “I’m OK” button to clear the alert. This phase lasts for 15 seconds.

3. Play an audible alarm while displaying a 20-second countdown stating that it will place an emergency call (“No pulse detected / Calling 911 in…”)

4. Call 911 through the watch’s LTE connection, or through a connected phone, and play a recorded message to them (not audible to you or to bystanders). The message states that your watch detected a loss of pulse and that you are unresponsive, and it gives your approximate location.

5. While the call is ongoing, there is a “talk to 911” button displayed on the watch. You (or a bystander) can tap that button to interrupt the recorded message and speak to emergency services as a regular phone call.

What is (and isn’t) loss of pulse detection good for? 

The loss of pulse detection feature is promising for what are sometimes called “unwitnessed” cardiac arrests, as a group of Italian healthcare professionals wrote in the journal Resuscitation. I wasn’t able to find any real-world accounts of this feature saving someone’s life, but to be fair it’s only been available for a few months. 

Google emphasizes that the feature is not intended to provide any treatment or be expected to save your life, and definitely cannot replace medical monitoring devices that may have been prescribed or recommended to you by your provider. It can’t prevent a loss of pulse, or determine the cause of a loss of pulse, and it can’t even be sure that its emergency calls will go through. 

Importantly, the loss of pulse detection process has not been tested in a variety of real-world situations that may increase the risk of false alarms, or of missing a real event. These are some of the people who might be most interested in this feature, so it’s worth noting that the feature has not been tested for people identified as high risk for sudden cardiac death, or for people who are pregnant, under 22 years of age, who have chronic pain, poor blood flow to the wrist, peripheral nerve conditions, cognitive impairment, sickle cell disease, or who have a tattoo on their wrist that may interfere with the sensor. 

How well does loss of pulse detection work on the Pixel Watch 3?

Google has published a brief summary of the results of their testing from the watch, as part of this document that gives instructions for use. They tested the feature on 135 volunteers, including—according to a press release—stunt actors who simulated falls while wearing a tourniquet.

The sensitivity in a clinical trial was 69.3%, meaning that the feature was activated 69.3% of the time that a person had an actual loss of pulse. The other 30.7% of the time, it didn’t activate. That’s not great, but the idea seems to be that it’s a lot better than nothing. 

The other metric of accuracy, specificity, Google described as amounting to “1 false positive call over 7.75 user-years” with 131 of their users. (That would be compatible with 131 users wearing the watch for about three weeks each, resulting in one person getting a false positive, but Google didn’t release the full results so we can’t say whether that’s exactly how the study went, or how their use compared to what you might be doing with your watch over the next 7.75 years.) 

If you do get a false positive, you’ll have a few chances to cancel the alert before it gets as far as calling emergency services. If you tap that “I’m OK” button, the watch will ask if you were doing anything innocuous that may have triggered it. Sleeping on your arm is one of the options; so are a loose fit on the watch band, and not wearing the watch at all. Google also notes that other factors like ambient light, or pressure on the skin, may sometimes result in false positives.

How to enable (or disable) loss of pulse detection on the Pixel Watch 3

Once the feature is available here, it will be an option when you’re setting up a new watch. (So far it hasn’t been announced for any Fitbit models or older Pixel watches, just the Pixel Watch 3 in both sizes.) To turn on loss of pulse detection for the Pixel Watch 3 that you already have, go into the Pixel Watch app, tap Safety & Emergency, and look for Loss of Pulse Detection. There is a switch that allows you to turn the feature on or off.