Google began rolling out end-to-end encryption at the end of last year for select Google Messages beta users who have enabled Chat, Google’s implementation of RCS. End-to-end encryption ensures that conversations stay encrypted from when they leave your smartphone, to when they arrive at the other end. There is no server-side decryption, meaning that data can’t be collected in the middle from the servers that pass your messages along. This is a selling point of many texting applications like Signal as it’s a major step towards ensuring the privacy of a user, and now it’s finally rolling out to more users who use Google Messages.
Of course, until either RCS (Rich Communications Services) or iMessage is available across both Android and iOS, neither will be a solution to universal messaging or replacing SMS. Ironically, as I understand it, both depend on Tim Apple! RCS needs to be a standard independent of just Google alone as we’ve seen how many times Google changes its mind over messaging apps, and having iMessage controlled by a single company is also not a universal solution.
See Encrypted messaging is now available for more users in Google Messages
#technology #RCS #E2EE #instantmessaging
End-to-end encrypted messaging is now rolling out to more users in Google Messages, giving RCS another advantage over SMS.