Google backs off on previously announced Allo privacy feature • Hacker News Board

Re: Google backs off on previously announced Allo privacy feature

#101

Post by KMag » Wed, Sep 21, 2016, 6:18 PM UTC

darawk wrote: post #87

retox wrote: post #2

>Allo messages will still be encrypted between the device and Google servers, and stored on servers using encryption that leaves the messages accessible to Google’s algorithms. 'using encryption that leaves the messages accessible to Google’s algorithms' So, not meaningfully encrypted at all then?

They could be using some form of homomorphic encryption here, in which case it would still be meaningfully encrypted.

Homomorphic encryption isn't currently practical, even for small-ish problems. It needs to use constant space, and every operation needs to flip on average half of the bits. There aren't obvious ways around these restrictions, though off hand I can only come up with a quick hand-wavy "proof" that this must always be so if less than one bit of the unencrypted state is to be lost with every state update.

So, in order to perform machine learning on terabytes of data, you need to flip terabits for every update of the homomorphic state machine.

That being said, I could imagine someone coming up with a homomorphic encryption algorithm that starts out with a few megabits of excess entropy and leaks entropy at a bounded rate while remaining more efficient at calculation, and where the initial state is set up cleverly such that after a bounded number of steps, the state machine starts making nonsense computations and stops leaking entropy. Though, this just feels very brittle to intentionally leak entropy, and I have no idea how anything remotely like this could be actually constructed.

Re: Google backs off on previously announced Allo privacy feature

#102

Post by nevir » Wed, Sep 21, 2016, 6:20 PM UTC

themihai wrote: post #91

otabdeveloper1 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> SSL only handles the first two bullet points. Only the first point. If Google works like every other data center in the world, then SSL stops the moment your data hits their first load balancer.

Most datancenters are lost once the internal network is hacked so I think that's a different issue. Encryption wouldn't help either because the attacker could get the keys too.

Encrypted links between processes inside a data center is still a good thing: It protects against malicious actors sniffing traffic (without compromising the machines in the data center)

Re: Google backs off on previously announced Allo privacy feature

#103

Post by nzp » Wed, Sep 21, 2016, 6:31 PM UTC

Sylos wrote: post #94

nzp wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if they weren't (mainly) an advertising company, even if they charged for all the free things, they'd still need all the data they suck in to provide services they provide.

That's simply not true. They collect a ton of data which they wouldn't have to collect, if they wouldn't run advertisements or could even just delete this data much earlier. There's even crap like Android not allowing you to selectively turn off the Internet Permission for apps, for which there is no good reason other than Google needing an internet connection to display their ads.

It's not true that machine learning and AI needs a lot of data to do what it does with Google's services? I guess you know something their engineers don't, so I'm looking forward to Sylos' Dataless AI & Co. I bet a lot of us would even pay good money for such a thing.

Sigh, I'm not arguing that they don't collect for advertising, I'm not even defending them at all. It's just that the things they do are impossible to do without a huge amount of data, regardless of advertising. Again, if you're so sure that it is “simply not true”, here we are, YC is your oyster. Or any other tech VC fund for that matter.

Re: Google backs off on previously announced Allo privacy feature

#104

Post by makomk » Wed, Sep 21, 2016, 6:34 PM UTC

nevir wrote: post #100

otabdeveloper1 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> SSL only handles the first two bullet points. Only the first point. If Google works like every other data center in the world, then SSL stops the moment your data hits their first load balancer.

Google does not work like every other data center in the world. All internal services communicate over SSL (or similarly encrypted links)

Though only because they discovered their internal unencrypted links were being systematically compromised on a truly massive scale for years.

Re: Google backs off on previously announced Allo privacy feature

#105

Post by CaptSpify » Wed, Sep 21, 2016, 6:35 PM UTC

nxzero wrote: post #70

hydragit wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, moxie "knows it all" wants to control his apps so much he doesn't want them to be on f-droid https://f-droid.org/posts/security-notice-textsecure/

Do you feel f-droid's build security should be trusted, an if so, why? >> ""F-Droid has received criticism for distributing out-of-date versions of official applications and for its approach to application signing." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/F-Droid

> F-Droid has received criticism for distributing out-of-date versions of official applications

Thats not a bug, it's a feature

Re: Google backs off on previously announced Allo privacy feature

#106

Post by karmajunkie » Wed, Sep 21, 2016, 6:40 PM UTC

kyrra wrote: post #40

karmajunkie wrote: post #4

Was anybody actually planning to use Allo for encrypted communications? I was under the impression it was written off at its announcement.

Why was it written off? It's using Whisper Systems tech to do it's end-to-end encryption[0]. Is there someway Google could inject itself into this, or some reason people shouldn't trust it? [0] https://whispersystems.org/blog/allo/

Not sure TBH, I just remember a lot of negative discussion around it and the privacy picture when it was announced. Perhaps bad on me for not doing all the due diligence when it came out but I'm generally biased against the assumption of security or privacy in online chat anyway so didn't bother going further with it.

Re: Google backs off on previously announced Allo privacy feature

#107

Post by wybiral » Wed, Sep 21, 2016, 6:44 PM UTC

slantedview wrote: post #72

You either want encryption, security and privacy or you want other things like history. Allo choosing the latter makes it useless for anyone who really cares about security or privacy.

There's no reason that the history couldn't be encrypted in a way that's only accessible to the client. There are even techniques for encrypted indexing and keyword search.

Re: Google backs off on previously announced Allo privacy feature

#108

Post by puzzle » Wed, Sep 21, 2016, 6:59 PM UTC

spaceheeder wrote: post #64

sidlls wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps it's some kind of homeomorphic encryption scheme. Hey it technically leaves the original message encrypted!

As rad as it would be if Google started doing privacy-friendly-ish datamining on user data by homomorphically encrypting it, you and I both know that's not what they're doing. You forgot the `/s`, sadly.

Along those lines, there's RAPPOR:

http://research.google.com/pubs/pub42852.html

Re: Google backs off on previously announced Allo privacy feature

#109

Post by alanwatts » Wed, Sep 21, 2016, 7:00 PM UTC

jerf wrote: post #82

alanwatts wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>the fact that many people are more worried about marketers than the NSA? How do you know this is a fact , was a global survey done? >I am more concerned about A than B" is not a claim that B does not exist, nor is it a claim that "I" am unconcerned about B. Indeed, however the phrase "100% tinfoil hat mode" does imply being unconcerned about B, and that anyone who is is a lunatic.

You seem to have a problem with adjectives. "Many" is not most . I don't need a "survey" to establish the "many" when I can just read many people expressing their concerns on HN. That's "many" enough for me. Now, to be clear, by "people" I mean "humans" not "abstract sentients including AIs that don't yet exist", and by "concerns" I mean "things that are at least slightly negative to the thinker" and not "things that…

Ah, my mistake. I misread it as "many more people..."

Re: Google backs off on previously announced Allo privacy feature

#110

Post by DiabloD3 » Wed, Sep 21, 2016, 7:06 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #99

kryptiskt wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's easy, TLS is great for Google as ISPs and wifi providers can't replace ads with their own in transit.

That is some Alex Jones level reasoning. There's no end-user security you can provide that can't be reframed that way.

What he said isn't even entirely wrong... both adware and shitty ISPs do this, mostly as a vector for malware. Google has admitted as such, and migrating their ad platform to https and teaching Chrome and Firefox to refuse mixed content was part of not allowing their service to be abused for this.

Just because Google sells something we don't like doesn't mean they're evil, but it means they have a responsibility to limit the attack surface outside attackers use. There is no way to eliminate all attack surface while still allowing third party admins or closed source code (technically, its impossible period, but w/e).