During its keynote at the Google I/O 2016 developers conference, Google announced a couple of new messaging applications one of which is called Allo. It walked us through most of the app’s features during the keynote and they really are quite impressive. Google touted the messaging app’s safety and security features as well but apparently it wasn’t able to convince Edward Snowden, the man who showed us the true extent of the NSA’s electronic spying programs.
We’ve come to a point now when Snowden talks about privacy, people tend to listen, and he can regularly be seen recommending communications services which have a higher chance of keeping your conversations secure.
It wasn’t surprising to see Snowden weigh on Google’s new messaging application, and even though it’s good that Google has added end-to-end encryption in Allo, Snowden doesn’t like that Google has decided to turn off this option by default.
Allo won’t provide users with end-to-end encryption if they don’t turn on the option themselves. Snowden calls Google’s decision to keep encryption disabled by default “dangerous,” and says that the app should be avoided for now.
Google hasn’t commented on this yet and there’s no indication from the company that it’s going to turn on end-to-end encryption by default when Allo launches in the near future. It merits mentioning here that other similar apps like WhatsApp provide end-to-end encryption to all users by default.
Filed in . Read more about Allo, Edward Snowden, Google, Google i/o 2016 and Whatsapp.