Opt-in encryption is no encryption.
...until you opt-in.
If you care about privacy, you should not use Google Allo
11–20 of 153 posts
Re: If you care about privacy, you should not use Google Allo
#12I very much agree with the principle of restricting and monitoring the access law enforcement has to communications.
In practice, I weep for a third party that has to read the dumb shit I chat about.
If we do succeed in building a hell where a preference for Metallica in 1997 is grounds for any sort of consequences at all, I'm not going to blame my past self for foolishly broadcasting that preference, I'm going to blame my current self for cowardly compliance with the hell machine.
Re: If you care about privacy, you should not use Google Allo
#13I find it super interesting that this is on the front page at the same time as a ex-Google design ethicist is talking about respecting the user ahead of commercial interests.
It's always good PR to talk about doing things for the users. Then there's business.
Re: If you care about privacy, you should not use Google Allo
#14This is the usual privacy hysteria knee-jerk reaction: "Watch out, the big companies are going to get data on you!". And people are going to react exactly like they've done before: if the service is worth it, they'll be happy to trade a few bits of privacy about themselves in exchange for the benefits. Also, I'm not sure the author of this piece understands what encryption is about since he laments that most people d…
Of course you have to send Google search queries. Of course it would be a whole lot more elegant on their part to have a simple SLA: "We use the search queries for the express purpose of answering your queries. We do not hold on your personal information for more than XX minutes, neither in personalized nor in aggregated form." It's not that hard, a 30 people organization can pull it off, https://duckduckgo.com/about.
Even better if there were a law that would require internet service providers to provide such a guarantee for people that want it. Make the tradeoff between a few bits of privacy and the benefits realistic, not "either you surrender your privacy, or live as an Amish".
Re: If you care about privacy, you should not use Google Allo
#15Relax; it's a Google side product. With 95% certainty, it'll be dead within one year.
Re: If you care about privacy, you should not use Google Allo
#16Opt-in encryption is no encryption.
It's the end-to-end part that is opt in. Normal messages are encrypted in transit and while stored and only the machine learning system has access to them otherwise.
https://vnhacker.blogspot.com/2016/05/security-and-privacy-i...
Of course that means it is just Google policy protecting the messages internally and it probably isn't resistant to a warrant, but the messages are protected from other access.
Re: If you care about privacy, you should not use Google Allo
#17I pay cash for all my transactions.
I don't own a car because I fear that the registration systems for licensing and taxes will gather information about me and we know that those government data systems are most vulnerable to attack.
When I travel, it's by bus only - requiring a form of identification at the airport is a front to government spying. Unfortunately, the bus systems are starting to require too much information as well and when this fully happens I'll have to stop traveling by this means too.
Voter registration is unfortunately a front for other malicious activities - such as jury duty, a state-mandated intrusion into my most private information and thoughts - not even bringing up electronic voting - so I stay away from those booths.
I find that just renting an apartment requires too much sharing of my personal information, I try to provide the minimum, but I still find my address on the web and you can see where I live on google street view which is very frustrating.
I don't talk to others and when I do, I don't tell folks anything about me, I'm concerned that they may tell others and pretty soon everyone is going to start showing up at my home and my job and frankly I don't want to answer my door buy their stuff - or worse - they could be hiding violent tendencies.
Today's society makes it extremely difficult to be a nobody. If I could crinkle into a ball and fade away, I would, but, unfortunately, I'm still breathing.
Re: If you care about privacy, you should not use Google Allo
#18Gboard only receives search data, and they make a really big effort to tell you that.
Re: If you care about privacy, you should not use Google Allo
#19I very much agree with the principle of restricting and monitoring the access law enforcement has to communications. In practice, I weep for a third party that has to read the dumb shit I chat about. If we do succeed in building a hell where a preference for Metallica in 1997 is grounds for any sort of consequences at all, I'm not going to blame my past self for foolishly broadcasting that preference, I'm going to bl…
The issue with surveillance isn't that boring stuff might be surveilled. It's that the small fraction of people with interesting things to surveil will be surveilled.
I don't care if the NSA sees my communications. There's no real chance of them thinking I'm a terrorist. I emphatically do care if the NSA sees the communications of the next Malcolm X or Mohandas Gandhi or Harriet Tubman. Or worse, if that person is so afraid of surveillance a priori that they don't bother becoming an activist at all.
Re: If you care about privacy, you should not use Google Allo
#20You can't have Allo's friendly and useful features AND have end to end encryption. Allo has struck a good compromise. Allo's secure mode is enabled by OWS, which has a very solid reputation for privacy. This along with new security features in Android N make Allo likely to be impervious to threats short of an NSA TAO full-on attack and/or a black bag job. It would be dumb to discourage use of such a tool.
Google's business needs aside - aren't modern phones powerful enough to process chat content locally, without exposing anything to the outer world? Or it's still more CPU or memory-hungry task than a phone could provide? (I don't have any knowledge/experience in modern computer learning, so genuinely curious.)
It's the data. If you are in New York and chat "Where should we eat?", the phone has to either have a massive amount of data on hand or request some data to make local suggestions.
Then you have to balance how current the data is and storage and so on against the elaborate privacy protection. Google knowing that some person is near some intersection probably isn't much different than Google knowing some person is in NYC. Fresh results about the intersection will naturally be faster to return than fresh results for a larger area that then have to be filtered down on the device.
I guess this is a good reason to add POIs to OpenStreetMap.