Google Allo : Mountain View returns his jacket on the protection of data – ZDNet France

Google gives the kick-off for Allo, instant messaging infused with artificial intelligence that gives you an address of a restaurant when you tell a friend that you’re hungry. The e-mail application that Google had presented at its conference Google I/O, focusing on two main promises : artificial intelligence and the protection of user data. Encryption of end-to-end, incognito mode, any message stored on the terminal : the first presentation of Allo seemed to draw heavily on the success of the messaging applications secure, such as Signal or Telegram.

Allo was as well referred to the fact that the messages exchanged by the user with his contacts were not stored on the device, or only transiently. A feature that was surprising, but was finally disabled by Google in the version of Allo available to the public, as noted by The Verge.

Google has not entirely dropped the pane data protection enforcement : the incognito mode offers encryption of messages, and those are encrypted during exchanges with the server. But by default, these are stored by the application in clear, a step back compared to the first statements of Google.

To justify this decision, it is necessary to consider the other great promise of the e-mail Google : artificial intelligence. Google Allo presents itself as a messaging boost to artificial intelligence, capable of blowing out the responses, in particular via the ” Smart Reply. “But in order for the application to be able to provide you with consistent answers, the tools Google need to access the history of conversations to analyze the content of messages. Personal assistant to Allo is thus able to offer a café located at mid-distance of the person with whom you are talking about if you mention the possibility to go for a drink.

For Google, the choice to preserve the messages was a necessity to keep decent performance on his personal assistant. For those who wish to escape the solutions are thin : it is always possible to manually erase its history of message or be resigned to only use the incognito mode to discuss with Allo. What incognito mode does not store the messages exchanged through the application.

also Recall that in a tweet, Edward Snowden judge and the decision of Google to turn off in Allo encryption by default “dangerous” for not allowing the app to be secure. As a result, it does not recommend that you use Google Hello, for the moment.