iMessage is safer than Google Hangouts, or at least that's what the Google employees who participated in a question-and-answer session that took place yesterday on a social network in the US, give to understand. If Apple's system was praised for its ability to keep our messages private and prevent the American federal agencies from intercepting them, this does not happen in the case of Google Hangouts.
Based on the answers given by Google employees in the question and answer session, Google Hangouts encrypts the messages sent by users only during the transfer to Google servers. As soon as the messages arrive in Google's servers can be read without problems by the American company, or any other federal agency that has access to them.
Unlike Google Hangouts, iMessage uses user and server encryption, so messages arrive encrypted in Apple's infrastructure and without the encryption key they cannot be read by anyone, especially government agencies. Google has confirmed that it does not use an encryption system when sending and receiving Google Hangouts messages, so user data is vulnerable without Google and anyone else.
For non-technical readers, this means that Hangouts are only encrypted on their way between your computer and Google's servers. Once they arrive at Google's end, Google has full access. In short, this is confirmation that Google can wiretap Hangouts.
If you don't use Google Hangouts or don't care that the service doesn't encrypt your data, then you won't have much reason to worry about data protection information while using the service. Even so, the fact that Google does not fully encrypt the data sent or received through Google Hangouts is worrying since the company promotes the adoption of HTTPS protocols and the protection of user data.
