Are Google Hangouts conversations secure? During an AMA on Reddit, Christopher Soghoian, a technologist at the American Civil Liberties Union and an expert on surveillance technology, asked David Lieber, Google's director of information security, why the company isn't saying more about allowing government agencies to eavesdrop on its users' communications.
Although Google has never claimed that the service uses end-to-end encryption, it has stated that the information you share on Hangouts is “encrypted to keep it secure,” whatever that means.
Salgado, on the other hand, happened to mention that “comments are encrypted in transit,” which, when explained in non-technical terms by reddit user_poly, means that once the conversations reach Google, the company can pretty much do whatever it likes with them, including making them available to authorities.
Following the inadvertent confirmation, Motherboard contacted a Google spokesperson who supported Salgado's statement that the company's messaging system does not use end-to-end encryption.
Not that this confirmation was necessary, given that the EFF had published a diagram as part of their campaign on Hangouts security. The EFF says that Hangouts is as secure as Facebook chat, meaning it only passed two of the seven checkpoints recommended by the organization.
Furthermore, in a transparency report published on their official website, Google revealed that they had cooperated with US authorities in 2013, giving them permission to intercept data for legal reasons.
Source: iguru
