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Google backs off on previously announced Allo privacy feature
- retox 10y ago>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?
- sidlls 10y agoPerhaps it's some kind of homeomorphic encryption scheme. Hey it technically leaves the original message encrypted!
- Filligree 10y agoIfmeaningful homomorphic encryption was an option, then we'd be living in a quite different world.
- sidlls 10y agoVery true. I was just making a tongue-in-cheek conjecture about the justification/rationalization that might be employed.
- sanxiyn 10y agoSurprisingly, homomorphic encryption is now practical enough to run a Kaggle-like data science competition, but without disclosing data. At least one such competition is known to run with real money prize. https://medium.com/@Numerai/encrypted-data-for-efficient-markets-fffbe9743ba8 https://medium.com/@Numerai/encrypted-data-for-efficient-mar...
- foresight 10y agoThis reads like fake smoke and mirrors to trick investors/data providers/participants instead of anything that's real cryptographically.
- spaceheeder 10y agoAs 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.
- puzzle 10y agoAlong those lines, there's RAPPOR: http://research.google.com/pubs/pub42852.html http://research.google.com/pubs/pub42852.html
- 0xmohit 10y agoSo, not meaningfully encrypted at all then? One could also think of it as your private key being with (1) you, (2) Google. It's in safe hands ;-)
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- fao_ 10y agoahem Perhaps not https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)
- croon 10y agoSure, whatever safe hands mean. Safe in an NSA datacenter. Safe in the hands of the Chinese government. Safe with whatever sysadmin has access to it. Instead of worrying about what "safe hands" mean, just keep it accessible only to me, and each respective conversation with the people I communicate with.
- 0xmohit 10y ago> just keep it accessible only to me One could also argue that the service is free and the service provider needs a (or yet another) way to monetize it. If the privacy settings are insecure by default, one shouldn't have high expectations anyways.
- jtrip 10y agoAnd that's a little scary, you sell a bit of yourself to get access to a service. It's not really the best case scenario I would want.
- xenadu02 10y ago> One could also argue that the service is free and the service provider needs a (or yet another) way to monetize it. True, which is why I pay Apple money. No incentive to mine my data... in fact given that privacy is a big marketing angle Apple's incentives are to make it impossible for them to access your data even if subpoenaed or presented with a warrant.
- gmazza 10y agoAnd that is exactly why open IM protocols and 3rd party clients are so important. If both you and your correspondents do use 3rd party IM client ([1], [2], etc), then just run OTR2 or OMEMO on top of the protocol, and let google store whatever it pleases - it's not going to be much use for them. [1] https://pidgin.im/ https://pidgin.im/ [2] https://conversations.im/ https://conversations.im/
- nevir 10y agoProbably stored under the same security infrastructure as Gmail and hangouts messages. Which, IIRC, means no human is given direct access without the account holder's permission. Algorithms are allowed access, but only if they emit data that is similarly secured, or emits data in aggregate (where, I think, aggregate was defined as 100k+ users per aggregate data point) It's extremely hard for a Googler or product team to do something directly nefarious, but you do have to trust Google's privacy infrastructure.
- jtrip 10y agoI don't think that is enough. Here we are relying on Google being magnanimous enough to not use the data to increase their profitability. And even beyond that, your opinion is a little naive to hold in a post-snowden world.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- tehwebguy 10y agoRight - their policies may be perfect today but they may not even exist tomorrow.
- witty_username 10y agoHow is it necessarily wrong if Google uses the data to increase their profitability?
- Zigurd 10y agoThat's fine as far as trusting Google keeping their employees from doing bad things. But that's not the first concern one would have. Pervasive surveillance programs have penetrated service providers' data centers. Law enforcement can get warrants to access this information too easily, and many service providers turn over information on request, rather than requiring a warrant.
- themihai 10y ago
- rryan 10y agoI've seen this sentiment in a couple of places now -- and the news media and non-technical folks seem to refer to "encryption" very loosely to mean "protected in the way I want it to be protected at the times I want it to be protected". Can we please use technical terms with precision? You can have data encrypted at rest and in transit that is still accessible to the provider and the fact that the provider can decrypt it for processing doesn't make it any less "encrypted". There is not a total ordering of encryption or security schemes. If you would like to say that the data isn't end-to-end encrypted such that it is opaque to the service provider -- say that. Don't say it isn't meaningfully encrypted.
- darawk 10y agoThey could be using some form of homomorphic encryption here, in which case it would still be meaningfully encrypted.
- KMag 10y agoHomomorphic 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.
- darawk 10y agoThat is only true for fully homomorphic encryption. There are simpler cryptosystems (e.g. ElGamal for a trivial example) that have more constrained homomorphisms that theoretically could be used here.
- KMag 10y agoThe OP was talking about encrypting the chat data and performing machine learning on encrypted data without decrypting it. I really wouldn't know where to begin to construct such a thing using a simpler cryptosystem, such as ElGamal. Do you have any hints as to where to begin?
- omouse 10y agoThere is actually some research work on this front because it is highly valuable to analyze some data but not have access to it. However, it's better just to encrypt everything and not be tempted by the advertising surveillance dollars.
- losvedir 10y agoWas it really expected in the first place that the ordinary messages don't get saved on Google's servers? As someone with a passive interest in Allo but who hasn't been following it closely, I never assumed the "smart AI" messages were anything other than simple hangouts-type messages that get stored on Google's servers. I'd even expect (/hope) them to be someday accessible on the web or transferable to a new phone. It's the incognito that are end-to-end encrypted and I expect are secure from Google's prying eyes. And I don't think anything has changed there. This is a non-issue for me, anyway.
- karmajunkie 10y agoWas anybody actually planning to use Allo for encrypted communications? I was under the impression it was written off at its announcement.
- mxuribe 10y agoYep, I'm with you. At least I know I've written it off.
- kyrra 10y agoWhy 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/ https://whispersystems.org/blog/allo/
- pritambaral 10y agoThere is always a way to inject malicious code in a codebase you control. The Allo apps are closed-source and their code is solely controlled by Google. Doesn't matter which protocols they claim to be using, when they could simply push an update which silently uploads your private keys to their server (or breaks the claim in any of the many different ways). This is the same reason even WhatsApp's use of 'end-to-end encryption' cannot be considered secure from WhatsApp.
- bagacrap 10y agoso, do you write your own compiler as well?
- WallowC_33 10y agoRepost
- karmajunkie 10y agoNot 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.
- joosters 10y agoThese privacy articles make a big deal about law enforcement being able to access messages. Surely a much bigger concern is Google being able to access the content?
- NetStrikeForce 10y agoOne implies the other.
- tombrossman 10y agoA fair percentage of people (myself included) are far more concerned about protecting our data from marketers, advertisers, and data brokers, than we are about going 100% 'tinfoil hat' mode and worrying whether the NSA is monitoring my messages for thought crimes. These are two very distinct issues and not everyone is concerned about both equally.
- alanwatts 10y agoDr. King was monitored by the NSA for "thought crimes". Is that "100% tinfoil hat mode"? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_King_Jr.#NSA_monitoring_of_King.27s_communications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_King_Jr.#NSA_mon...
- kbart 10y agoAnd how many "Kings" do you know personally?/s What me (and presumably, OP) trying to say is, that an ordinal person should be much more worried about their private data being collected and used (virtually) unconstrained by the shady companies than three letter agencies. This doesn't imply that mass surveillance isn't wrong and evil, these two things are orthogonal.
- jerf 10y agoHow is that relevant to the fact that many people are more worried about marketers than the NSA? Nobody's questioning that some people are in fact so monitored. "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.
- Odenwaelder 10y agoWho needs yet another messaging app? Aren't the 10 I have installed enough already?
- nxzero 10y agoHere's Moxie's related press release on doing E2E for Allo: https://whispersystems.org/blog/allo/ https://whispersystems.org/blog/allo/ Curious if he'll comment on what happened: https://twitter.com/moxie https://twitter.com/moxie https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=moxie https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=moxie ___ If you don't know about Moxie, highly suggest learning more about him: https://thoughtcrime.org/ https://thoughtcrime.org/ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoughtcrime https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoughtcrime https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moxie_Marlinspike https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moxie_Marlinspike
- eps 10y agoThe best new friend of Facebook Moxie? His "trust us, we checked FB Messenger code and it's all good" pitch made for a very entertaining read.
- nxzero 10y agoAware of that issue (asked moxie about it on HN) and other issues too, but it doesn't change that there's zero reason to believe Moxie's intent is malicious and it's a stretch by any means to claim his contributions are anything but positive in sum.
- BostonEnginerd 10y agoI'm not sure why Moxie gets so much grief on some of these issues. To his credit, he's released just about everything under a free software license -- with reproducible builds and all. Ultimately, it's his baby and he can do what he wants with it.
- nxzero 10y agoWhile speculation, Moxie's projects appear to have gotten (deservedly) a lot of attention, which brings a lot of feedback that's unfounded and potential malicious; for example, the f-droid comment about in my opinion fails to reflect both sides of the issue, and build security is VERY IMPORTANT and often ignored. I don't know Moxie, but we've exchange messages before and never got the sense that off the cuff he was discounting any feedback. At a very highly level we agree about what he's doing, though I get the sense that anonymity is something we don't exactly agree about, but do understand a little of why he feels the way he does.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- romanovcode 10y agoFirst thing I thought when saw the release of this app is that it will record everything I do because it's google. Thanks but no thanks, google. Stay evil.
- vbcr 10y ago> Stay evil. Wow. Google went a full 180 from being a company that promoted itself by saying "Don't be evil" to something evil. Couldn't Google have made its billions still being not evil, without its privacy issues, without its obnoxious desire for tracking everything. Did they turn to this evil for the money or just because they can do it (or if not someone else will).
- romanovcode 10y ago>Couldn't Google have made its billions still being not evil No. Google is advertising company and advertisement companies need a lot of user data for targeted ads.
- tanqueray 10y agoHow does it benefit by keeping data forever though? Of what use is aged data?
- hiddenkrypt 10y agoIt doesn't. They need a constant stream of new data for their business model to work. Thus, they benefit from continuously collecting data on users.
- tanqueray 10y agoSo why do they store indefinitely? If they stated a retention period openly they'd get much less criticism over privacy.
- 10y ago
- rryan 10y agoThis seems to be where the "backing off" claim is coming from: http://www.theverge.com/2016/5/18/11699122/google-allo-messaging-app-announced-io-2016 http://www.theverge.com/2016/5/18/11699122/google-allo-messa... > First, all conversations are encrypted "on the wire," which means that nobody on the internet can read them as you send your message. They are read by Google's servers, but Kay assures me that the data is stored "transiently," which is to say that Google doesn't keep your chat logs around to be subpoenaed. And Fulay adds that Google doesn't assign identity to the chat logs on those servers even then. I think this is a misunderstanding -- either on the part of the authors or from the Google employees on understanding the question asked by the authors. Kay probably meant that in Incognito mode, messages are stored transiently. I don't believe that has changed, has it? Did Google really say that non-Incognito messages would not be stored server-side? What happens if you lose your phone -- do you lose all your Allo chat history? That would be a really shitty user experience.
- mkaziz 10y agoThat basically happens with WhatsApp if you don't back it up somewhere.
- blowski 10y agoI lost all my WhatsApp chat history after a phone upgrade went wrong, and it didn't cause me any problems at all. I recognise that my use case is not the same as everyone's, but if I want to save something from WhatsApp, I put it somewhere else.
- zeveb 10y agoYeah, and I normally don't bother to copy over my SMSes. I can, and I appreciate that, but they're really so ephemeral that it's not worth the bother.
- JustUhThought 10y agoAnd just yesterday someone on HN didn't understand why the recent Google messaging apps weren't being more widely adopted. It's clear the public wants some assurances around privacy, or at least transparency where it is lacking. Not to mention, this is the umpteenth product they are planning to deprecate, uh, I meant launch (Grand Central, Voice, Wave, Talk, Hang Outs, etc).
- slantedview 10y agoYou 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.
- wybiral 10y agoThere'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.
- JohnLeTigre 10y agoWow, they could generate stylometric profiles and sell that for mega-bucks. Kind of creepy I say.