“Telegram is not a private messenger. There’s nothing private about it. It’s the opposite. It’s a cloud messenger where every message you’ve ever sent or received is in plain text in a database that Telegram the organization controls and has access to it”

“It’s like a Russian oligarch starting an unencrypted version of WhatsApp, a pixel for pixel clone of WhatsApp. That should be kind of a difficult brand to operate. Somehow, they’ve done a really amazing job of convincing the whole world that this is an encrypted messaging app and that the founder is some kind of Russian dissident, even though he goes there once a month, the whole team lives in Russia, and their families are there.”

" What happened in France is they just chose not to respond to the subpoena. So that’s in violation of the law. And, he gets arrested in France, right? And everyone’s like, oh, France. But I think the key point is they have the data, like they can respond to the subpoenas where as Signal, for instance, doesn’t have access to the data and couldn’t respond to that same request.  To me it’s very obvious that Russia would’ve had a much less polite version of that conversation with Pavel Durov and the telegram team before this moment"

  • Kailn@lemmy.myserv.one
    8·
    2 hours ago

    As much as I’d like to favor foss and federated messenger apps, telegram isn’t as much garbage as whatsapp:

    1.The client is somewhat open source and have forks like Forkgram, Materialgram and unoffical clients like Telegrand.
    2. Telegram isn’t E2EE by default but at least it doesn’t lie about it and have E2EE secret chat when nessesary, that means crucial chats stay on your device and the rest stay on their database recoverable and syncable across devices.
    (Yes, whatsapp supposedly is E2EE but we can’t know for sure, it’s closed-source.)
    3. You can use telegram as a cloud service with only 2GB per file limit, unlike whatsapp.
    (There’s even a third-party app that utilise this as a cloud gallery.)
    4. Even tho telegram has ads in large channels, telegram isn’t funded by a greedy big-corp and it doesn’t datamine you, ads are based on the channel’s topic.

    Yes, in terms of privacy, telegram isn’t the best option, Signal, Session, XMPP, Matrix, or SimpleX have better privacy features, less linkability and E2EE by default but telegram is very mainstream and got more publicity, making it the whatsapp alternative it advertises itself as-is.
    Publicity doesn’t make a better messenger app, but for what it tries to do, it’s adoptable for simple users, doubles as cloud storage and is more secure than the garbage being whatsapp.

    Immigrating users to different apps is a headache on it’s own, but if they know of telegram and it’s not privacy invasive, that’s not bad.

      • Kailn@lemmy.myserv.one
        2·
        38 minutes ago

        Yes, but how would you know Meta doesn’t have a copy of your encryption key (ex: when you sign up) and keeps a copy of your encrypted messages somewhere?
        AFAIK your encryption key resides as whatsapp’s data folder but since whatsapp is closed-source you can’t guarantee that whatsapp gave the encryption key to Meta’s server at some point when it was created; (or it was created on their servers and sent to your device.)

        One would just assume the encryption key is made on your device and never sent to Meta and all the E2EE messages aren’t kept on Meta’s server after they are sent.

        Again, Meta is a company that is profiting on targeted advetising and selling user data, how would whatsapp be a free service without any profit?

        Also, Here’s someone who saw their whatsapp chat used for targeted ads on them in case you have doubt.