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Google Accused of Showing 'Total Contempt' for Android Users' Privacy (bleepingcomputer.com)
On the heels of a terse privacy debate, Google may have found another thing to worry about: its attempt to rethink the traditional texting system. From a report: Joe Westby is Amnesty International's Technology and Human Rights researcher. Recently, in response to Google's launch of a new messaging service called "Chat", Westby argued that Google, "shows total contempt for Android users' privacy."
"With its baffling decision to launch a messaging service without end-to-end encryption, Google has shown utter contempt for the privacy of Android users and handed a precious gift to cybercriminals and government spies alike, allowing them easy access to the content of Android users' communications. Following the revelations by CIA whistleblower Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption has become recognized as an essential safeguard for protecting people's privacy when using messaging apps. With this new Chat service, Google shows a staggering failure to respect the human rights of its customers," Westby contended. Westby continued, saying: "In the wake of the recent Facebook data scandal, Google's decision is not only dangerous but also out of step with current attitudes to data privacy."
"With its baffling decision to launch a messaging service without end-to-end encryption, Google has shown utter contempt for the privacy of Android users and handed a precious gift to cybercriminals and government spies alike, allowing them easy access to the content of Android users' communications. Following the revelations by CIA whistleblower Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption has become recognized as an essential safeguard for protecting people's privacy when using messaging apps. With this new Chat service, Google shows a staggering failure to respect the human rights of its customers," Westby contended. Westby continued, saying: "In the wake of the recent Facebook data scandal, Google's decision is not only dangerous but also out of step with current attitudes to data privacy."
Guilty as charged. I think it's time for some serious anti-trust action in Federal court.
Google would never allow end-to-end encryption of data that they'd like to mine. Why would anyone be surprised?
Google has seriously looked at the best means of supplying an encryption "back door" and it turns out the best way is no encryption , let everyone know the alphabet agencies can spy on you, and a warning not to post anything important.
It is debatable, whether Facebook and Google show more contempt towards privacy than the users themselves
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Wont someone think of the ads and profits.
All that real time data to collect and sell.
You are the product.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Google "Chat" is a protocol much like "SMS". It's not a service in and of itself but the underlying carriage for services to ride on top. Those services should absolutely include encryption but that is not the protocol's job to handle. "Joe Westby is Amnesty International's Technology and Human Rights researcher" Sounds like this research should do a little more research.
then use the Signal messaging app at both ends.
The fact that Google gathers your data and uses that to make piles of money is different than the fact the people just want fancy SMS. Their new SMS app (as I understand it, that's all it is, but I don't use SMS or anything Google chat related) is just giving people what they want.
While Google is putting support behind RCS, it's not a Google thing, it's an industry-standard evolution of SMS. Google really should do better and offer end-to-end encryption, but that would only work in their walled garden, and they would still have to interoperate with everyone outside of that garden, who they have no control over.
Guess which one it is. Hint: It tangentially has to do with robots.
One day there was noise in my kitchen. I went there and saw Bill Gates eating my ice cream. I asked him why he thought it was okay to do that. He said permission to eat my food was on page 89 of the Windows 10 license agreement.
I asked him why a billionaire would want to eat someone else's ice cream. He said it gives him a feeling of superiority.
Also, he said that there is a competition among billionaires to see who can be the most abusive. He still manages Microsoft: "I'm there about 15 percent of the time." The result: Windows 10 is possibly the worst spyware ever made.
Bill Gates said that Windows 10 spying, putting ads on Windows, making the Windows user interface far worse, forcing updates that are often buggy, and hiding the purpose of the updates makes him confident that he is more abusive than Google and Facebook.
I don't use messaging on anything. Don't trust it.
Now that the whole Facebook shit hit the fan, we can finally hope that this whole privacy destroying data collection madness gets some attention.
Keep the stories coming. And make sure that they keep the steam they have now.
And yes, it doesn't even matter what kind of story. Few people will actually understand what's really going on anyway. But what matters is volume. If there is story after story after story about how companies destroy our privacy, people will finally listen. Not because they understand, but because of the amount that surfaces.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Any reasonable person knows that large-scale messaging services offering end-to-end encryption facilitate sex trafficking. It is not legal to knowingly do that in America today. Starting any new end-to-end encryption product without retaining a key is folly unless you lock it from US or Russian use. It's a recipe for losing big money in civil suits.
"out of step with current attitudes to data privacy."
The current and former CEO have made it very clear what their stance on data privacy is: "privacy is dead;" was the quote. So Google's current attitude about data privacy is the same as it has always been. From their point of view, they're doing you a favor in not trying to delude you into believing that you have privacy and being upfront and out in the open that you have none.
"Be particularly skeptical when presented with evidence confirming what you already believe." -
Hey asshole -- you use my code, then you are my bitch
-- love, Sergey
Chat isn't a replacement for any encrypted communications tool.
It's a replacement for SMS, which is also not encrypted.
It's required to be backward compatible with SMS, because not all networks or phones will support it. You can't do end-to-end encryption when one end doesn't support encryption.
It's required to be operated by cellular carriers, so to be able to be operated in various countries, access to messages is a requirement, like SMS.
It's required to not have a central set of servers that are operated by a single company, like iMessage, WhatsApp, etc.
This is just like gmail where you cannot received encrypted files (such as .7z). Google will not handle emails they cannot open and read.
Don't use it. I stopped using all Google chat/messaging products years ago after they started abandoning platforms every 6 months. Fuck Google.
Privacy is a fundamentally supported feature in iPhone.
WHY?
I own an Android phone but Google are _RETARDED_ with messaging apps. ... it's incredible just how poor they've handled this.
The amount they've made in the past decade and either modified or cancelled is UTTERLY mind boggling, it's fascinating, it's
I can't put in to words properly just how confusing and terrible it is. They have failed in every conceivable way. They just can NOT stop making new ones, killing old ones, damaging features. It's a total and utter disaster.
I use whatsapp and 'normal' SMS / text. I won't use Google Chat, Google Hangouts or Allo or anything because they WILL terminate / ruin it in time.
All they had to do was copy iMessage and have some kind of "SMS from your PC / ipad" functionality and they would've been golden, but nah, they decided to do an utterly, utterly miserable job.
Toe-Cheese Stallman has been saying that for more than a decade.
End to end encryption is fine, but Google (for once) is doing the right thing by having a telco standard instead of an over-the-top app sending God-knows-what.
Would I like to see end-to-end encryption? Yes. I'd like to see SS7 issues fixed first. There are plenty of E2E secure messaging solutions out there and I can't see why RCS is worse than MMS as a solution for enchanced SMS service.
At the very least, this is a fully interoperable system, not tied to Google, Inc or any specific carrier.
That's a Good Thing.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
the entire android eco-system is a security disaster. Its almost like the entire thing was written by an ad department who put their best con-artists to work.
RCS is a communication protocol. We can encrypt the data just like with SMS using the client of our choice. https://github.com/SilenceIM/S... Using an open, distributed protocol is much better than a closed ecosystem. For example, the keys for iMessage and most other encrypted messaging platforms are controlled by the central servers managed by the company. They issue new keys every time a new device is added to the account. It is usually not possible to see what keys have been issued or to otherwise control them from the client side. Therefore, they can read "end-to-end" encrypted messages simply by issuing a key to a device they control and recording all messages in the conversation from that point forward. Using a client to encrypt RCS eliminates this problem. Regarding metadata, whatever server processes the messages has metadata, like who is speaking with whome, how often, and when. For all of these closed systems, it is not possible to run one's own server. In the case of SMS and RCS, the cellular provider has this information. The nice part to this is that not one organization has access to the metadata for all the conversations across the platform, because almost every market has multiple viable carriers (although, large governments could collect this information from all carriers and consolidate it into a central database). In this regard, it is an improvement over iMessage, or Hangouts, or Allo, or WhatsApp, or Signal, or Telegram. But is isn't as good as running an XMPP server yourself with OMEMO encryption. Regardless, Google should be praised for supporting an open standard instead of a closed system. And RCS might finally solve the problems with concatenated SMS. https://www.smallbusinesstech....
What an utter waste of time. I don't want any value added services. Just give me a dumb pipe to the internet.
There's no way I'll use another Google message service
'CIA whistleblower Edward Snowden'
How does this get printed still. At least be accurate:
'GRU spy Edward Snowden'
The First Rule of trusting someone's opinion is knowing that they have their facts right. Edward Snowden is not a CIA whistleblower. So WADR, if you get that wrong, why should I trust your opinion which follows that? I shouldn't.
absolutely, i would be soooo happy with a SMS from PC capability. Nuts that I can't have it (and no i'm not going to use a 3rd party app for it).
And what IM service should I sign up to?
What will I use to send messages to my friends who don't install apps on their phone. People who don't have a google account, not even due to concerns, but because they don't need to - or who have a "gmail" they use on desktop/laptop, but stays there or in a browser perhaps.
iMessage is some proprietary IM with SMS fallback?
If Google did an exact copy of that, I think we would be talking about a new multi-billion dollar monopoly abuse lawsuit.
Because "Chat" was just the fancy name they gave to RCS, which (to my knowledge). I don't think they really have anything to do with that... they just provided a convenient package for carriers to use to get RCS implemented. By that same logic, should we use the same case due to the fact that their Messages app uses SMS which is also completely devoid of encryption and security?
Just give me a dumb pipe to the internet.
So you want sendto(). It already exists.
first off he has no idea about telco protocols and the way that the world wide phone system works.
Second he (and alot of people here) are confusing google and their "chat" app and RCS which are not the same. Google's "chat" is their new app that is going to use RCS to send messages, they are not interchangeable, chat is the app, RCS is the protocol.
thirdly, as a technology and human rights researcher you would think that he would at least get Snowden's agency right, he blew the whistle on the NSA not the CIA.
Google Wave for the win!
That's because Google no longer hires the smartest, which is something you can clearly see on the leaked internal memos. The only thing they can do now is hipster vector graphics.
Yes, RCS is a replacement for SMS which is also not encrypted, but this is about Chat, the app that Google is packaging this protocol with standard in all Android phones in a near future, possibly in the next Android update.
An no, just because RCS is a protocol doesn't mean it couldn't have included encryption there.
It should have, but Google caved in to anti-privacy government and carrier demands.
So the complaint still stands and is still fair.
Stop apologizing for Google's crappy offerings.