Are conversations from Google Hangouts safe? During one AMA at Reddit, Christopher Soghoian, a technologist at the American Civil Liberties Union and a surveillance technology expert, asked David Lieber, Google's director of information security, because the company does not say more about allowing government authorities to intercept communications users.
Although Google never claimed that the service uses κρυπτογράφηση end-to-end, έχει δηλώσει ότι οι information that you share on Hangouts "Encrypted, to be safe," whatever that means.
Salgado, on the other hand, happened to mention that “comments are encrypted at transport,” which, when explained in non-technical terms by user reddit_poly, means that once the conversations reach Google, the company can pretty much do whatever it likes with them, including making them available to the authorities .
After inadvertent confirmation, the website Motherboard contacted a Google representative who backed up what Salgado said, that the system exchange messages of the company does not use end-to-end encryption.
Not that this confirmation was necessary, as EFF had published a chart as part of their security campaign and Hangouts system. EFF says the Hangouts system is as safe as Facebook chat, which means that only two of the seven checkpoints proposed by the organization have passed.
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.
