The new Top Gun movie is out and if you haven’t watched it yet – you can still do it. I like it a lot and not only because it brought back my childhood memories — the movie is really good.
And just like the movie that wants to yet again “take our breath away” so does Google want to take our privacy away, one more time.
To that end, the search giant decided to merge two of its messaging products – Meet and Duo. Sure, the official line is that under normal circumstances Google won’t be able to read your messages; the problem is that they can do it with a court order. And according to the NSA leaker Edward Snowden, the courts have no problems issuing such orders to the NSA and FBI on a regular basis.
Yes, as a regular user you have nothing to worry about, except that someone at some point may use what you say against you. And all this in an app that comes with top-notch security.
In the meantime, Google may just use the contents of your talks to serve you more personalized ads, yet again turning all of us into products. To be fair, it would be algorithms that would analyze any such data and not human beings, but still… The end result is that we all become entries in a database that is used to generate sales for any number of companies.
Yes, it’s a freaky world out there and many of us are willing to forgo our privacy in exchange for some free software.
Back to Google’s announcement… The plan is to add all of the Meet features into the Duo app in the coming weeks, and finally rename the Duo app to Google Meet — at which point, it will be the company’s single video communications service.
In the meantime, Duo users will be able to do business as they got accustomed to, with no changes on their end.
We should end this note by recommending some other service, but honestly we’re not sure which solution would that be. We also don’t trust Microsoft so I guess if you have to video chat with someone – use Zoom.