I’m from Mexico, and the most used chat application is WhatsApp. It’s used for EVERYTHING. I use Telegram only for contacting my family members (both my parents and my brother). They also use it only for this family chat. All my (and their) contacts use WhatsApp instead.
Now with the news that Telegram will collaborate with Twitter, I feel that I should delete it. Not that Zuck is any better than Musk, but still…
Also I don’t think it’s worth the effort to teach my parents yet another messaging app, like signal.
Collaborating with Xitter is not the most distasteful thing Telegram has done. Its marketing model has been to consistently lie to people about being encrypted when that’s only true in very limited cases. It has also catered to criminals by attempting to make it difficult to comply with legal demands for information, while holding that information for its own purposes.
Signal, on the other hand is always encrypted and does its best to hold as little information about users as possible.
Also I don’t think it’s worth the effort to teach my parents yet another messaging app, like signal.
What is there to learn? Every popular messaging app has pretty much the same UI.
Isn’t it good for a communication company to be noncompliant with people’s conversations?
Being unable to comply (signal) and selectively refusing to comply while still having access to the data (telegram) is not equivalent
“Selectively” is a new word that wasn’t mentioned in the post I replied to. I get that it’s better to not have access to the data at all, and lying to customers is shitty, etc. I use signal and not telegram. But ‘refusing to comply with demands from other groups for data access is correct behavior’ was my only argument. Nothing about equivalence
It might be correct behavior but when there are laws in place to force the company to comply, actually having the data is a problem.
It usually wasn’t conversations that were at issue. People would engage in criminals acts, such as trading child sexual abuse media in large unencrypted group chats. Law enforcement would find links to those chats, join them, and observe criminal acts, leading to court orders to Telegram to disclose whatever identifying information it had about the offenders, such as phone numbers and IP addresses.
Telegram intentionally split storage of that kind of information across jurisdictions that do not cooperate so that it was effectively impossible to obtain orders for all of them. They bragged their marketing materials that they have never complied with a court order for user information. Taken as a whole, I see that as intentionally facilitating child abuse.
Signal’s approach is pretty much the inverse; rather than hoard data about users and shield people they know have done evil, Signal has ensured that it does not know the contents of any conversation, nor anything about users other than when they created the account and most recently accessed it.
IIRC Signal stated that they can collect IPs of some users if asked by a judge but that’s about it (not retroactively). Which imo also further proves that they actually value privacy without using it as an excuse to make money from people doing truly evil shit
there’s no learning curve with Signal, it’s almost exactly like whatsapp.
but how to find groups?
Unlike the other two, there are no servers that run discoverable group chats.
exactly that’s why it will always lag behind
Its what makes it more secure. Why do you need a chat app that allows your parents to accidentally stumble into a group of con artists or kids to stumble into things they shouldn’t be exposed to? It’s a messaging app, not gamer group chat.
This is what puts is way ahead of the others.
Also, making it harder for pedophiles to find each other and groups where they can share their shit is a good way to defeat all the shitty “think about the children” laws that European countries are constantly trying to pass to make encryption illegal
For public groups you probably want something like Matrix.org instead. Also open source, also supports E2E encryption
There’s a search bar which will filter your conversations, and you can create a new group with new message (pen icon) ->new group
I’d take Telegram over WhatsApp as I find Telegram, ignoring privacy concerns, is an excellent messenger. Much better than WhatsApp
But, Signal’s pretty great.
I hate Facebook but isn’t WhatsApp end to end encrypted by default? I know telegram is not.
Yes, but it’s not open source and it’s Meta so I don’t have a lot of trust there. Plus you can always just activate the Secret Chat feature on Telegram for E2E encryption that I’d just more than WhatsApp’s.
End to end encrypted doesn’t mean they don’t potentially store a copy of the keys somewhere. With proprietary software, you never know what it’s actually doing since you can’t verify the code does what it says on the tin.
facebook bought it for billions, they gotta recover the money somehow?
Switch to Signal. It’s not like there’s anything to learn, the UI isn’t all that different from WhatsApp
Telegram was developed by Russians and HQ is in United Arab Emirates. They have always been sketchy af.
Telegram’s owners are at odds with the Russian government though, hence the move to another country.
There’s plenty of problems with Telegram without having to resort to Russophobia already.For example their chats aren’t even E2E-encrypted by default and afaik there’s no way to have encrypted group chats either.
I’ve heard good things about Signal, maybe try that?
If you get rid of Telegran, at least you’d only have one shitty messenger instead of two.
Also I don’t think it’s worth the effort to teach my parents yet another messaging app, like signal.
My friend, just set up Signal on their phones, put it in place of the Telegram app and watch them not even notice anything changed.
Not if they’re the kind of users my parents are. An update moves a button from the bottom-left to the bottom-right and suddenly “the app you gave me is broken again”.
Also, don’t sneak-change things on other people’s phones.
Here’s another comment endorsing Signal.
I really distrust telegram. There are some many dark patterns around it and the server is closed source so I’d say the distrust is very well deserved.
has there been cases where telegram chat been leaked/compromised?
Many. One particularly awful case is how at the beginning of ruzi invasion of Ukraine a lot several Russian resistance figures were compromised through Telegram due to it using phone numbers for security which are incredibly insecure and needless to say in control of the government.
I personally avoid telegram for anything sensitive or personal. Because there is no end to end encryption. You should move to Signal.
If you care about these things best would be to use a chat application like Jami which won’t end up like WhatsApp.
Unless you wrote it yourself, never assume that an app won’t inevitably enshittify itself. People thought that about Firefox, too.
In what way do you consider Firefox to have enshittified itself?
They’ve been adding AI chatbot integrations into the browser lately.
Ah yes. Very much a feature “no one” asked for, I imagine. At least not I.
But luckily, I’ve been largely unaffected by that addition. It’s been easy to ignore so far.
SimpleX is another alternative. There are so many popping up that I can’t keep track anymore.
Despite being in the hands of the zuck, whatsapp is more private and secure than telegram, and not because of any collaboration with X/twitter, it’s been that way forever… so go ahead and use it (but if you can, signal is even better on that front).
WhatsApp is more secure by design, but one suspects that Meta is up to something. But I suppose to whatever extent it’s possible to trust Meta, they are nonetheless likely a better guarantor of your security than Telegram is
Meta don’t need to see your chats to get a lot of value out of WhatsApp.
They can see who you message (the phone number) and from there they can probably ~90% of the time identify who that person is via Facebook/Instagram databases. They can see who you message when, and how often you message them, and what time of day you send and recieve messages - all of that is very valuable to help them create an advertising profile for you.
Exactly
Threema. And don’t forget, real privacy and security, with centralized services, is never free. The app is tested by third party and is open source. And, you don’t have to share your phone number, unlike with Signal.
You no longer have to share your phone number in signal. They added a unique user identifier a while ago that you can share to add new contacts. This is not permanent by the way, you can change this user identifier anytime.
I downloaded telegram about a year ago when I first heard about it. There is a feature to find and talk to people in the same area as me. It was all just escorts with nudes as their profile pics. I’m honestly surprised Google and Apple allowed it on their stores.
