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U.S. officials urge Americans to use encrypted apps amid unprecedented cyberattack
(www.nbcnews.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
End to end is end to end. Its either "the devices sign the messages with keys that never leave the the device so no 3rd party can ever compromise them" or it's not.
Signal is a more trustworthy org, but google isn't going to fuck around with this service to make money. They make their money off you by keeping you in the google ecosystem and data harvesting elsewhere.
End to end matters, who has the key; you or the provider. And Google could still read your messages before they are encrypted.
You have the key, not the provider. They are explicit about this in the implementation.
They can only read the messages before encryption if they are backdooring all android phones in an act of global sabotage. Pretty high consequences for soke low stakes data.
I'm pretty sure the key is stored on the device, which is backed up to Google. I cannot say for sure if they do or don't backup your keyring, but I feel better not using it.