Hooray Allo. Or not.
Hot on the heels of Google’s announcement of a new smart messaging app, Snowden warns that no one should be using it.
What is #Allo? A Google app that records every message you ever send and makes it available to police upon request. https://t.co/EdPRC0G7Py
— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) September 21, 2016
This is in direct contrast to claims from the tech giant that the app would be at the cutting edge of privacy. Features like end-to-end encryption and expiring messages are only available as an opt-in feature. If you don’t begin a conversation in incognito mode, or with encryption on, your messages are stored. Forever.
Free for download today: Google Mail, Google Maps, and Google Surveillance. That’s #Allo. Don’t use Allo. https://t.co/EdPRC0G7Py
— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) September 21, 2016
As Snowden reminded the twitterverse, all stored messages are available to law enforcement upon request. In fact, the US authorities responsible for authorizing such requests didn’t reject a single request surveillance request last year.
Hello, Big Brother
So if you’re enjoying the shiny AI of Allo, or most any messaging system really, make sure and tell Big Brother hello (which if you’ve been reading here for any amount of time, you already knew).
