
Security and Privacy in Google Allo - n3mes1s
https://vnhacker.blogspot.com/2016/05/security-and-privacy-in-google-allo.html
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mtgx
_> Basically with one touch you can tell Allo that you want to "Always chat in
incognito mode going forward," and from that moment on all your messages will
be end-to-end encrypted and auto-deleted. You can still interact with the AI,
but only if you explicitly invoke it_

YES! That's the _minimum_ privacy level that all messengers should have. From
my point of view, the "best of both worlds" would be with the Cloud AI
_disabled by default_ , maybe with a one-tap enabling inside the chat window
and a notification to the other people in the conversations.

But if for whatever reasons companies don't want to make that compromise, then
we should _at least_ get an option so that each individual _could_ make end-
to-end encryption the _default_ if they _want to_.

Again, this should be the _minimum_ , and not the fact that the messenger
simply offers end-to-end encryption somewhere burried in the settings and only
works when you explicitly enable it everytime you want to use it. That's not
acceptable for an app that cares about privacy from my point of view because
it's too _inconvenient_ even for those that actually care about their message
privacy.

As for the future, homomorphic encryption could be one option (although who
knows how long it will take to get here), but if you just want to offer your
users "AI enhancements" and you don't just offer that as an excuse to _collect
their data_ , then companies could also enable _client-side AI_ in the future.
I think this could be a lot closer than many think. If the demand is there we
could start seeing AI-accelerators as co-processor in our smartphone SoCs
within the next 5 years, especially as Moore's Law slows down to a crawl and
we start getting diminishing returns from the "faster 8-core CPUs" in our
smartphones.

Such chips are already starting to pop-up, but because there's no current
demand for them to be in smartphones yet, they are relegated to other more
niche markets. In the next 5 years they could become a lot faster, too,
especially that now Google is showing the way with ASICs as well.

[http://www.movidius.com/solutions/machine-vision-
algorithms/...](http://www.movidius.com/solutions/machine-vision-
algorithms/machine-learning)

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badallo
Wow, they say: "That's fine. We understand your concerns. Everybody including
me has something to hide."

It is not an issue of having something to hide. It is an issue of knowing that
your conversation is really just between you and your companion.

