Many in the crypto and privacy community mistakenly trust Telegram because it’s “end to end encrypted”, but there are huge issues including not hiding the metadata, censorship, centralization, and phone numbers.
Send this video to your friend that asks why you won’t join: video.simplifiedprivacy.com/why-telegram-sucks/
I think it is quite well known that only Telegram Secret Chats are true E2EE. That said, Telegram is still not in the business of selling metadata actively like Whatsapp/Facebook/Meta are. As far as plain features go, Telegram is streets ahead of Whatsapp. But if I needed real “secret chat” I’d probably use Threema, SimpleX, Nostr, Jami, etc where I’m not tied to my mobile phone number or e-mail address.
Who thinks in the privacy community that Telegram is end to end encrypted? They were largely mislead. That’s an option, that even prevents sync of the chat between your devices.
The thing is, Telegram has some shady things, but until Matrix becomes usable this is one of the very few usable options. And until then, use Telegram FOSS from F-droid.
Huge sync times (not just first time, but also if the client was offline for a few weeks)
New room members in encrypted rooms can’t read old messages even if you have set it up that way
Fortunately they are working on all of these, and as I just found out recently, they also have an alpha version app now that makes use of the new efficient sync, which I expect to fix 2 of the above (the resource usage is partly because of how sync works now)
Wow, not to pick on the narrator, but this comes off like the worst small town used car dealership TV advertisement I’ve ever seen.
Here’s a real rundown I’ve put together over the years:
Pavel Durov’s argument is that there should be a high functioning UI/UX experience for “non-secure” communication, and when you need it there’s something much closer to Signal’s very secure client-to-client encryption.
Arguably Telegram secret chats are even “close enough” to cloud chats an adversary might not notice you’re doing the “super secret things” (making it harder to identify what to target).
They also provide verified builds even on iOS (though it’s a bit of a hack, not “really” quite the same thing).
The only things that can really be said about Telegram’s secret chat crypto are that:
It’s not "the default"
It’s their own crypto (i.e., they broke “rule #1” and “rolled their own”)
Ultimately though, it’s been just shy of 10 years since Telegram entered the scene, and nobody has actually broken Telegram crypto in any meaningful way – AFAIK, to this day. Still, there are hypothetical holes in the crypto when scrutinized vs something like signal. So, is it as good as Signal or Threema? Eh, probably not, is it good enough for the average person that isn’t target by a nation state? I’d say probably.
And for most people, it doesn’t matter. It really doesn’t. I’m not even going to argue about that. I personally couldn’t care less about instant messaging with anonymity; anonymity and private are completely separate concerns.
I dont know what happened, but unfortunately that article is misinformation.
I was excited to sign up for telegram without a phone number, but the very first thing it asks you when you open the app is to enter your phone number. It won’t let you proceed without it.
It’s not misinformation, but it’s also not free. You have to “get a fake number” of sorts from the Fragment blockchain.
I don’t know much about those specifics because I live in the US, and fragment doesn’t work here (due to conflicting views with the FEC). In theory, a VPN might let you do what you want even if you are in the US.
Can we stop doing videos as news and opinion please? They’re an inefficient, annoying, and intrusive way to communicate this kind of information. If it doesn’t need to be visual, it is in video format only for monetization reasons, which I’d think would be more concerning to this community.
It may be once sliding sync and proper key handling of room history for new members get implemented.
Right now sync is very slow, the apps are heavy weight too (as I know at least partly because of how sync works today), and if a new member joins an encrypted room, they will not see the history even if you set it that way, because the clients that know the keys won’t send to theirs.
Why Matrix and not XMPP? XMPP is also flawed, but much less bloated, easier to selfhost and doesn’t have so many people being on central instance like matrix.org (there are other arguments as well).
It does NOT cost money on F-Droid. You don’t even need to install the market itself, you can get the app from F-Droid’s website (though then you’d have to check for updates yourself). For me, it was a chance to get mom to F-droid.
The point is not that it’s private, the point is that they are not owned by Facebook, don’t collect as much data and give up to law enforcement as Whatsapp does, and it is based outside of the West and the 14 eyes. People say WhatsApp is end to end encrypted but if it is proprietary and owned by the second largest ad driven company in the world, how can you be sure?
and it is based outside of the West and the 14 eyes
It is based in a country that’s an ally of several 14 eyes country and you can bet your bottom dollar that it isn’t a country that’s going to tell the Big eyes of the 14 eyes to go f itself if they come knocking.
It was incredibly easy to have friends and family download the app and replace their SMS app with it.
Almost zero change or learning curve on their end, and we all got increased security when we used it.
Telling your parents to download yet another new app to talk to just you is a no-go and sabotaged their goal of increasing security for people at large.
SMS is INCREDIBLY insecure, and it doesn’t surprise me that they dropped it. It risks giving a false sense of security to anybody who doesn’t understand encryption (like, you know, your parents). They’ll think that any conversation in Signal is secure when most of them probably aren’t.
Signal isn’t “yet another new app”, it has been around for a decade and it continues to be the gold standard for E2E encrypted messaging. The fact that SMS still exists and people are stupid enough to use it does not mean Signal needs to maintain a feature that made their product inferior.
Fair enough, the features are nice. I just want people to know that they’re compromising on security by using Telegram. But if you don’t have any REAL reason to be paranoid, then you don’t really NEED to use Signal.
The only thing Telegram has going for itself is that it’s Non-Meta and Non-Western.
Anyone who has a closer look at Telegram’s reputation knows that their privacy claims are dubious. If you want end to end encryption, even WhatsApp is better. But these things depend on your individual threat model.
Yeah, end to end encryption in a closed source app can’t be proven outside of the company and the company can’t be held accountable by the public even if it gets a third party audit at some point because it can always just change the source.
Open source, client side, end to end encryption is the only serious standard.
open source can also change over time. The only time you can trust it is when it does have an independent third party audit and even then they have very specific language saying what they found and in what version.
This is true, but those changes are visible. It’s much harder to get away with back dooring something that’s open source. At the very least, you need to be clever about it so as to not draw suspicion to your changes. I’m reminded of this story: theverge.com/…/linux-kernel-university-of-minneso…
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