Norton adds deepfake protection to mobile apps in push to make sure you don’t get caught out by scams

• Norton Deepfake Protection is part of its Norton Genie AI Assistant on Norton 360 mobile apps
• The tool is available in Norton 360 mobile products in the US, UK, Australia, and New Zealand
• It currently supports English-speaking YouTube clips

Norton has introduced a new feature which aims to help users spot deepfake audio and video content on their smartphones

Norton Deepfake Protection will be part of the Norton Genie AI Assistant on Norton 360 mobile apps – as until now, it was only available on select Microsoft Copilot+ PCs, and was considered an “early access” phase.

Now, Norton is spreading the tool’s availability, allowing even those without AI PCs to defend themselves against sophisticated scams.

YouTube support

A deepfake video or audio is a media file created using AI to realistically mimic a person’s appearance, voice, or actions, often made by training machine learning models on real footage or recordings.

This type of content was already observed being abused in different scams, and Norton says the tool provides, “an added layer of contextual protection” by spotting inconsistencies or faint deformations in the physical features of people appearing in videos.

For now, the tool only supports English-language YouTube videos, but there are plans to expand platform and language support in the future.

Anyone interested in testing the tool can upload YouTube links to the assistant to receive “real-time guidance on the authenticity of the video”.

The tool is available in Norton 360 mobile products in the US, UK, Australia, and New Zealand, across Android and iOS devices. Desktop support is “coming soon,” Norton added.

One of the most widespread deepfake scams on the internet is the famous “Elon Musk investment scam”, in which crooks created a deepfake of Elon Musk promoting his new cryptocurrency coin. In the video, he talks about the coin being the future of money transfer, and promises “huge gains” for the investors.

While early iterations of the scam were rather easy to spot, AI has improved significantly over the years, and will continue to do so, further blurring the lines between truth and deception.

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