Are conversations from Google Hangouts safe? During one AMA at Reddit, The 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 the fact that it allows government authorities to intercept its users' communications.
Although Google has never claimed that the service uses end-to-end encryption, it has stated that the information you share in Hangouts "Encrypted, to be safe," whatever that means.
Salgado, on the other hand, happened to mention that "comments are encrypted during transfer", which, when explained in non-technical terms by reddit_poly, means that once the conversations reach Google, the company can to do more or less what she likes with them, as well as to dispose of them in the beginning.
After inadvertent confirmation, the website Motherboard contacted a cface of Google who supported what Salgado said, namely that the company's messaging system does not use end-to-end encryption.
Not that this confirmation was necessary, as EFF had published a chart as part of their Hangouts security and system campaign. The EFF says the Hangouts system is just as secure as its chat Facebook, meaning it had only passed two of the seven checkpoints recommended by the agency.
In addition, in a transparency report that posted on their official website, Google revealed that they had collaborated with the US authorities in 2013 by allowing them to intercept data for legal reasons.
