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What's with Telegram? Heard mixed opinions on it. (lemmy.world)
submitted 9 months ago by to c/privacy@lemmy.ml
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Some people say it's really privacy-giving and that you should use it as a privacy alternative. Others say it's alao on the big tech side. What's going on with telegram, really?

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[–] 50 points 9 months ago (6 children)

Some people obviously do not know what they are talking about. Telegram stores clear text chat messages on their servers. That's not even near privacy

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  • [–] 3 points 9 months ago (3 children)

    stores clear text chat messages on their servers.

    Does it really?

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  • [–] 7 points 9 months ago (2 children)

    By default, yes. It is possible to create a so-called secret chat, which is standard for signal and similar, but that's something you have to manually do. Furthermore, it's not even possible to make secret chats for groups. When it was initially released, I was cautiously optimistic that it could turn into a good, secure application, but knowing it's been this long and it hasn't, I wouldn't consider that likely.

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  • [+] -7 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    It absolutely doesn't mean they store chats in plain text. There is no reason for it at all, it's extra work and extra stupidity. It's encrypted when the client sends it, no reason not to store it that way.

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  • [–] 3 points 8 months ago

    I'm not entirely sure what you're trying to say here. To clarify, telegram uses a store-forward architecture, meaning that it deletes messages from the server once they have been received by everyone. Until that time, the messages are stored on the server in plaintext, unless you're using a secret chat. They do this to avoid having to exchange keys between different clients, but what that really means is that it isn't actually private most of the time.

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  • [–] 0 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    A lot of debate has been had about whether the CEO is trustworthy, but I guess if they're not doing end to end encryption then there's no point.

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  • [–] 0 points 8 months ago

    There's no debate. The CEO is a compulsive liar who misleads people about how encryption works. Every one who knows how encryption works and have looked at Telegram will tell you Telegram is not encrypted

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