Snowden Says Goodbye Before He Can Say Allo

Google has recently entered the fierce battle of the messaging apps to counter the rise of Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and Apple’s iMessage with the creation of its own messaging app. Called Allo, the service has its own virtual assistant that works as your online guider – per say – depending on what you write and presenting you results and ads of various interests. Making its debut in an already app-flooded world, it received some warm interest from the community, something that didn’t dissuade the American giant corporation to try and bring some grist to the mill. However, that task now seems more complicated as what was presented as a step forward regarding privacy, led the infamous online surveillance lord Edward Snowden simply saying “don’t use it”. Here’s why.

When Snowden sneezes the world catches a cold

The reason behind this is plain and simple: Allo doesn’t provide end-to-end encryption by defaultand therefore all your conversations within its borders are forever stored by Google until you remember to manually delete them. This was exactly the reason that led Snowden to warn the world in three simple words and, honestly, the reason why the tech world is so worried about Google’s new messaging app. The lack of any encryption allows the company, hackers, agencies and your cat to read on what you’re writing. Furthermore, by default, all your Allo messages can be handed over to legal authorities by request. This is a double back by Google as the corporation had previously promised not to store any people’s chat data. Not only does it actually allow that; it actually does it by default for “service improvement” purposes. The sole reason for this is that it allows Alphabet’s Google to analyze the user’s behavior and, thanks to that, understand where there is space for improvement (and ads), how to bring more people to its search engine and, as a last resource, generate more revenue, until you decide to take some measures in the opposite way, probably when it’s already too late.

To end with, Allo usage should be ultimately up to you as there are other services that play by the same book – as in offering no encryption by default – that are massively used such as Facebook Messenger, Twitter direct messages, Snapchat, among others. However, please tread carefully; if Snowden doesn’t trust some online service, who does?