Edward Snowden, the infamous NSA whistleblower, recommended that users should stay away from Google's latest IM (Instant Messenger) app, called Allo, which was launched at the Google I/O conference last week.
Google launched the app even though it already had a solid market position with its Hangouts. No one outside of Google's top executives will ever know why Allo exists, but the app comes with some cool features like Incognito Mode, which uses end-to-end encryption, and self-deleting messages.
Unfortunately, none of these features are enabled by default. If a user hears about these privacy-enhancing features and installs the app, they won't benefit from any of them directly.
You will have to go into the app settings and enable them, and most users don't know they need to do that.
Something like this was pointed out by a Google researcher last week. The result? The Google engineer extensively edited and deleted parts of his blog ( cache ) in less than a day.
Arstechnica of all the changes the engineer made. It's now common sense that someone in Google's PR department contacted the engineer and silenced his entire report.
Furthermore, from a Google engineer revealing that Allo was not actually deleting messages sent in Incognito Mode and saying that it would fight to make Incognito Mode enabled by default for all users, the blog post turned into a third-party advisor who actually didn't say anything bad about Allo.
The lesson from this, as Edward Snowden pointed out, is that bosses read blog posts and that Allo has no immediate plans to enable end-to-end encryption by default for all users, just like WhatsApp. Oh, and if you didn't already know by now, WhatsApp doesn't use end-to-end encryption by default.
Meanwhile, this disaster has convinced Edward Snowden that Google does not put the interests of its users above all else and recommends that we use another app if we care about our privacy.
