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If you care about privacy, you should not use Google Allo

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Re: If you care about privacy, you should not use Google Allo

#101

Post by rpdillon »

Veratyr wrote: post #74
nothrabannosir wrote: post #40

Google would be insane to not offer some version of end-to-end encryption in a chat app in 2016, when all of its biggest competitors have it enabled by default. Who are all of its biggest competitors? Messenger sure doesn't do this (does it even have E2E at all?), Skype doesn't, either. Telegram, even if you considered it a big competitor, did they finally enable E2E by default? Or do you still have to open a "secure…

As of last January, WhatsApp handled ~30b messages a day [0]. As of this January, WhatsApp has 1b users [1]. iMessage has ~300m and "several billion" messages per day (hard to get stats unfortunately). Telegram has 100m users and handles ~15b messages per day [2] but, similar to Google, is not e2e encrypted. As of last month [3], Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp combined had 60b messages per day. Assuming WhatsApp dai…

I dug into iMessage a bit a while back, and it appeared that Apple held the keys for encrypted chats to allow messages to be sent to multiple devices that a person owns (laptop, iPad, iPhone), insulating the sender from having to know about each possible destination device. If the server has access to the keys, or can add their own key to a set of keys handed to clients during encryption, that fails to meet some definitions of 'end to end' encryption, since a server compromise will also compromise messages. Has the implementation changed in this regard?

Re: If you care about privacy, you should not use Google Allo

#102

Post by [deleted] »

visarga wrote: post #87
fixermark wrote: post #52

"Let that sink in for a moment: The selling point of this app is that Google will read your messages, for your convenience." If that's the author's objection, it's like the author never heard of Gmail. https://developers.google.com/schemas/tutorials/google-now-c...

Gmail? What about Google Search? It knows more about a man than his wife, doctor and lawyer combined. But Google convinced us to happily give up our privacy, for the amazing advantage (no sarcasm) of searching the internet. Maybe it was worth it, but Alo doesn't offer any ground breaking service.

[deleted]

Re: If you care about privacy, you should not use Google Allo

#103

Post by duaneb »

fixermark wrote: post #52

"Let that sink in for a moment: The selling point of this app is that Google will read your messages, for your convenience." If that's the author's objection, it's like the author never heard of Gmail. https://developers.google.com/schemas/tutorials/google-now-c...

It's a little different as gmail is useless without search. This is an extension to messaging that nobody was asking for.

Furthermore, email was never secure to begin with. E2E encryption has finally been making its way to devices; this is a major setback for the effort.

Re: If you care about privacy, you should not use Google Allo

#104

Post by ryanobjc »

rpdillon wrote: post #101
Veratyr wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As of last January, WhatsApp handled ~30b messages a day [0]. As of this January, WhatsApp has 1b users [1]. iMessage has ~300m and "several billion" messages per day (hard to get stats unfortunately). Telegram has 100m users and handles ~15b messages per day [2] but, similar to Google, is not e2e encrypted. As of last month [3], Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp combined had 60b messages per day. Assuming WhatsApp dai…

I dug into iMessage a bit a while back, and it appeared that Apple held the keys for encrypted chats to allow messages to be sent to multiple devices that a person owns (laptop, iPad, iPhone), insulating the sender from having to know about each possible destination device. If the server has access to the keys, or can add their own key to a set of keys handed to clients during encryption, that fails to meet some defi…

The injection of extra keys to your set of public keys on apple's servers is an issue. The counterpoint is you are (supposed) to get a notification on every time a new device/public key is added.

Re: If you care about privacy, you should not use Google Allo

#105

Post by ryanobjc »

pookeh wrote: post #23

Turning on E2E encryption by default and using your chat data for commercial purposes doesn't have to be a zero sum game... You can always extract important words from a "block" of chat messages, and feed that into your advertising engine, while keeping the exact sequence of your words and messages encrypted. Now if the AI bots require the exact sequence of your words to do NLP processing, then yea, you're SOL until…

At some point people were excited about agents, and conversational agents.

Well this is the first bits of that. That means some code somewhere has to read what you are saying. Then it helps you. The trade off seems clear to me.

And ultimately I do trust Google. The US government less so, but the solution to that isn't with encryption and crippling technology, but expanding privacy rights in the 21st century. Look forward not backwards.

Re: If you care about privacy, you should not use Google Allo

#106

Post by yq »

oceanswave wrote: post #17

I 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 infor…

Few questions,

1>how do you handle cellphones?

I found there is few option that you can have LTE network without giving up your identity.

2>how do you handle online payment/shopping such as Amazon?

Re: If you care about privacy, you should not use Google Allo

#107

Post by anexprogrammer »

billiam wrote: post #93
oceanswave wrote: post #17

I 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 infor…

I'm sorry, but the obvious sarcasm expressed here is all too common among the slightly younger engineers and related tech company people I work with. They believe that trading traditional notions of privacy for the shiny, novel conveniences of Uber and Google Now is totally worth it, and they see no downside. There are a lot of reasons, I think. The biggest is that for most, there really isn't a downside, yet. How ma…

> How many people are now identifiably being turned down for ...

There's the rub. For the most part you'll never know, unless it reached epidemic proportions.

"Sorry the apartment's gone" - Google told me you had financial problems 15 years ago.

"" (silence) - We infer from the internet you're gay so won't be offering you a job interview. It's illegal discrimination but can't be proven.

The effects of losing privacy in the scenarios you list are mostly invisible. The chilling effect on having legal but fringe or unpopular views has already been demonstrated.

So there is a downside for many. They just don't realise it.

Re: If you care about privacy, you should not use Google Allo

#108

Post by kpcyrd »

fixermark wrote: post #53
kpcyrd wrote: post #51

I can't come up with a sane reason why opt-in privacy is acceptable. Signal is handling the issues that may arise without any issues and whatsapp is just hiding complicated errors from it's users per default so they aren't confused, but they still get encryption by default in both cases. Opt-in end-to-end encryption is an anti-feature.

Anti-feature for your use case. Plenty of people prefer to trade convenience for anonymity.

How is whatsapp not convenient?

Re: If you care about privacy, you should not use Google Allo

#109

Post by kinkdr »

> If you care about privacy, you should not use Google Allo

"set the fox to guard the henhouse"

It is not that Google is evil, or anything. Quite the opposite, it is probably as good as a corporation can get in that respect.

But they do have a vested interested to learn as much as possible about the users, so they can sell ads, so they can still continue offer amazing products and drive innovation.

Having said that, I would, and do, trust them with all my private data. Things that I would trust only to good friends.

However, if I really wanted something to be absolutely private, Google would not be my first stop. A combination for GnuPG and TOR, maybe, but not Google for sure.

Re: If you care about privacy, you should not use Google Allo

#110

Post by fixermark »

kpcyrd wrote: post #108
fixermark wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anti-feature for your use case. Plenty of people prefer to trade convenience for anonymity.

How is whatsapp not convenient?

In the future, "because it doesn't integrate with my email and search tools to make it easy to get metadata on what I was just talking about with my friends." Maybe. Seems to be what Google is betting on.
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