(Newswire.net — September 22, 2016) — Former NSA expert on high-tech surveillance, Edward Snowden, warned that the newly launched chat app by Google should be avoided because it is “dangerous.”
Google Allo, the new “smart” chat app launched on Wednesday will “record every message you ever send and make it available to police upon request,” Snowden tweeted.
Google Allo was designed to dethrone chat leader WhatsApp, with promises to deliver quick conversations with features like; “Smart Reply.” This feature allows user to quickly respond to a message by selecting one of the answers that the “Google Assistant” feature offers.
The sophisticated app has an algorithm that recognizes and analyses your response, “learning” and “guessing” what your response would be in future chats. “The more you use it, the more it improves over time,” Snowden explained.
This new app actually collects and stores as much of your data as possible, and then uses artificial intelligence to analyze it, which results in “guessing” your response.
Naturally, as any other smartphone app, data collected can easily be compromised and costs users their privacy.
When first announcing “Allo” earlier this year, Google explained that the app works in “Incognito mode” and that there is no need for privacy issue speculation, as they assured users that its app has high end encryption, and it would only store messages transiently, rather than indefinitely.
Wednesday’s announcement, however, revealed that Google will not follow that path after all, but in fact, it plans to store all conversations that aren’t specifically started in “incognito mode” by default.
In his tweets, whistleblower Edward Snowden pointed out, that every single one of the NSA and FBI’s 1,457 surveillance requests was granted last year by the US foreign intelligence surveillance court. He said that same will happen with Allo’s stored data (i.e. your data) that Google will deliver upon request.
WhatsApp’s chats are encrypted and unreadable, which is the main reason it is leading chat app so far. However, the company announced last month that they will now be sharing your contacts and who you talk to with Facebook.