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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

#31

Post by joncrocks »

School-Cotton wrote: post #19
maxerickson wrote: post #12

I 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…

The problem is that even boring stuff can become 'interesting' with loosely worded and/or selectively enforced laws.

If you become a 'troublemaker', then retroactive trawling can reveal things that you may have done that are 'illegal', but wouldn't be enforced against a normal person in normal circumstances.

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

#32

Post by eevilspock »

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…

People, he's being facetious. But also specious.

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

#34

Post by solipsism »

School-Cotton wrote: post #19
maxerickson wrote: post #12

I 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…

I get all that, but I don't get what it has to do with Allo. Malcolm X probably knew to be careful what was said on the phone, because phones are easily surveiled. That probably didn't prevent him from using the phone for casual reasons.

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

#35

Post by drdaeman »

maxerickson wrote: post #20
drdaeman wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Well, analyzing locally and sending a query to Google Maps/OSM/whatever that basically says "food + New York" is one thing. For extra privacy, there can be even a nice opt-in that actually works with AI breaking into conversation with a "Hey, want me to suggest a good restaurant? Just tap here and I will look up some!"

I just wonder if today phones are powerful enough to process texts locally and not disclose the raw unprocessed data to the third parties.

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

#36

Post by pmontra »

Zigurd wrote: post #5

You 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.

You could have your server doing the search and aggregation job Google has centralized. Google could have sold those servers as home appliances, each of them spidering only those parts of the world our phones know we care about or we will. Travel next week to Berlin? Start downloading maps and transit schedules for there. I'm sure that it could be engineered to be as effective as what we have now. A centralized search engine would be ok. IMHO it would be a much better world but it's not how it turned out to be. Probably Google won't be as powerful as it is and they rationally made the choice, or they never considered the option. I bet on the latter.

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

#37

Post by mead5432 »

After the Snowden stuff, I still find it hard to entrust Google and Facebook with the data necessary to provide the super-personalized experience despite the things they have done to try and win back confidence.

Since I still use Google and, to a lesser extent, Facebook products, they have lots of data on me already but these kind of products still give me pause as I think about what could happen. If my experience is like many others, that could make it harder for these types of new products to find the adoption had all the NSA stuff not been revealed.

From a marketing perspective, it could be a really interesting study into the impact of a brand violating the customer's trust and the government's role in forcing the behavior.

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

#38

Post by darkerside »

What bothers me more than the lack of privacy or encryption is the idea that we are giving our voice to machines. We are moving to a society where we let technology speak to our friends and loved ones as if they were us. Something essentially human is being lost in that process.

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

#39

Post by LyndsySimon »

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…

Mr. Poe? Is that you?

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

#40

Post by nothrabannosir »

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 chat" for e2e? Kakao, WeChat, ... who else?

Honestly, aside from WhatsApp, I can't even think of one which anybody would consider "big".

That's indefensibly different from "All".

EDIT: Cool, I just learned iMessage is encrypted e2e! That's "Two" :)

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