THIS SPRING, TEXT messages got a lot more private. In April, the world’s most popular messaging service, WhatsApp, announced it would use end-to-end encryption by default for all users, making it virtually impossible for anyone to intercept private WhatsApp conversations, even if they work at Facebook, which owns WhatsApp, or at the world’s most powerful electronic spying agency, the NSA. Then in May, tech giant Google announced a brand new messaging app called Allo that also supports end-to-end encryption.
Making the news even better from a privacy standpoint is that both WhatsApp and Allo use a widely respected secure-messaging protocol from Open Whisper Systems, the San Francisco-based maker of the messaging app Signal.
To recap, there are now at least three different instant-message services that implement robust encryption: WhatsApp, Signal, and Allo. How is someone who cares about their privacy and security to choose between them?
In this article, I’m going to compare WhatsApp, Signal, and Allo from a privacy perspective.
While all three apps use the same secure-messaging protocol, they differ on exactly what information is encrypted, what metadata is collected, and what, precisely, is stored in the cloud — and therefore available, in theory at least, to government snoops and wily hackers.
In the end, I’m going to advocate you use Signal whenever you can — which actually may not end up being as often as you would like.
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