this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2023
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Privacy

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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: https://video.simplifiedprivacy.com/why-telegram-sucks/

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If you want end to end encryption

You use Signal.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

open source can also change over time.

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: https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/30/22410164/linux-kernel-university-of-minnesota-banned-open-source

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Telegram can be E2E, no reason to switch to Meta's app for it