The slight irony is that OTR encryption is a cryptographic communications protocol and a term that Google has misused egregiously.
So what, right? This change represents little more than a slight inconvenience and our reaction embodies our collective propensity toward fake online outrage, right? Sort of, but the discontinuation of XMPP has a more serious consequence upon closer consideration.Īs the EFF’s Parker Higgins notes, privacy-conscioususers that want to use OTR encryption will not be able to do so. Google is trading the user security and privacy offered by their open-source Talk platform for their new Hangouts platform, which will be a flashier, more competitive and seamless way for the company to tie together its previously discordant applications. You can turn individual chats off the record, but you’ll no longer have the option to turn chat history off for all of your chats.” “We’ve made a change to the Google Chat and Google Talk chat history settings. Users can still go off the record, but only on a contact-to-contact basis. “Going off the record” means just what you think it means: turning the feature on makes it so that your communications aren’t archived by Google in your chat history. The second and seemingly more relevant (but actually less impactful) consequence is that within the new Hangouts platform, users will no longer have the option of “going off the record” for all of their chats.
Hangouts will not support either of these functionalities. It also meant that Talk’s open-source framework supported ‘Off-the-Record’ (OTR) encryption, not to be confused with Google’s off the record feature, which I will explain shortly. XMPP meant that users could communicate across platforms, using Talk to send messages to users on AOL’s Instant Messenger and any number of other chat providers. While it’s true that there wasn’t much talk of privacy at the event, Google’s actions may have spoken louder than its lack of words when it became clear that the company would be rolling out a new instant messaging platform to replace its long-standing “Talk” app.Īs highlighted by our activist friends at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Google’s understandable move from the somewhat dated “Talk” to its new “Hangouts” platform has two consequences: one has to do with the extensible messaging and presence protocol (XMPP), an open-source communication tool that benefited from Google’s support, which the company will scale back dramatically as it implements it’s new messaging service. We recently wrote about the conspicuous lack of privacy discussion at Google’s recent I/O Conference in San Francisco.
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