Don't Use Allo

The buzziest thing Google announced at its I/O conference Wednesday was Allo, a chatbot-enabled smartphone messaging app that looks to take on iMessage, Facebook Messenger, and the Facebook-owned WhatsApp. Early sentiment about Allo is overwhelmingly positive: It looks beautiful, lets you doodle on images before you send them, comes with stickers as well as emojis, and it's the first Google product to offer end-to-end encryption, which is certainly a good thing. But if you care at all about your privacy, you should not use Google Allo. Allo's big innovation is "Google Assistant," a Siri competitor that will give personalized suggestions and answers to your questions on Allo as well as on the newly announced Google Home, which is a competitor to Amazon's Echo. On Allo, Google Assistant will learn how you talk to certain friends and offer suggested replies to make responding easier. Let that sink in for a moment: The selling point of this app is that Google will read your messages, for your convenience.