Telegram not being part of Western Intelligence Toolkit along with facebook, google, apple and others offends people to the extreme, so they make a hill out of moles. P2P is inherently privacy friendly and your IP is most likely going to geolocate to the ISP. Techcrunch seems retarded.
Leaking ip’s is meh, however sharing info with feds while mentioning not doing this very thing in their own FAQ is shady AF. Then we have their serverside being proprietary garbage, plus intrusive info collection (like why do they need no know my hostname, device model, desktop environment, etc?). Did I mentioned they started advertising crap based on the channels a user’s subscribed to? Yeah, telegram still sucks when it comes to privacy, and it’s only getting worse over time
Is it a leak if it’s a necessary technical part to a functionality?
The main issue is that it’s not obvious to non-technical users. They can’t asses what sharing IP address means either though.
The reason Telegram leaks a user’s IP addresses during a call is that, by default, Telegram uses a peer-to-peer connection between callers “for better quality and reduced latency,” Telegram spokesperson Remi Vaughn told TechCrunch.
“The downside of this is that it necessitates that both sides know the IP address of the other (since it is a direct connection). Unlike on other messengers, calls from those who are not your contact list will be routed through Telegram’s servers to obscure that,” Vaughn said.
To avoid leaking your IP address, you have to go to Telegram’s Settings > Privacy and Security > Calls, and then select “Never” in the Peer-to-Peer menu, as shown below.
Telegram defaults to using p2p for calls, for contacts only.
It’s not a thorough privacy default, but otherwise seems fine to me. If you want p2p it needs to be enabled, and if you don’t it needs to be disabled. No-contacts and no-calls receive no IP.
The information is usually not identifying beyond general geographic regions (at best)
if your threat model is that strict, there are other ways you should be obfuscating your IP than relying on VPNs, ISPs, and the apps/servers you’re accessing/using.
Usually it is the town, or nearby town. If you live in a more rural area that can narrow it down to a few hundred people.
Also in some less-developed countries the data protection by ISPs is very weak. Basically if you know someone in the police (or pay a bit under the table) you can easy get the exact name and address of the account owner if you have an IP.
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