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>Allo messages will still be encrypted between the device and Google servers, and stored on servers using encryption that leaves the messages accessible to Goog
by 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.