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Telegram is lying to you about privacy
(donald.cat)
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this post was submitted on 26 May 2026
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I’m not sure they are lying. Yes, they’re not E2E but I don’t think they claim to be by default, do they?
I’ve got a large group of friends there, since high school. We presume everything we write is available to the Russians so we never talk work details or share secrets. It would be insane otherwise.
We’ve tried to organise a move to Signal, but honestly its client is nowhere near as polished or feature rich as Telegram.
they claim to be "encrypted". if I just make a new chat it will not be encrypted. this is false advertising. furthermore this highly advertised feature has artificial limitations, like that desktop clients can't use it. it also cannot he used with group chats. so much for being "encrypted".
That's just your misunderstanding of the term. The chat is encrypted, no lies about it, it's not end-to-end encrypted. Last time I checked they were quite explicit about that.
So far, Telegram worked exactly as it was advertised, it's just people for some reason have weird ideas about what words mean and how stuff should work, but that's not on them to be honest.
Plenty to criticize Telegram for, but lack of privacy isn't it.
I was pretty sure someone is going to bring this up! "It uses HTTPS so its Encrypted™, you are just too dumb to comprehend it!"
well, yes, point me to a chat service that is not encrypted on the wire nowadays. I still think it is false advertising, because their clear intention is to make the user think their service is somehow more secure than others, while that is not the case. why would you advertise privacy and encryption, if not for arguing that you the provider cant read messages?
Ironically the owner of telegram is repeatedly posting on his channel about how much more secure telegram is over whatsapp, which is an actual end to end encrypted messaging app (but with other problems, like questionable key handling)
You know, if you end-to-end encrypted, but mishandle keys, it's actually demonstrably worse than if you client-to-server encrypted but there was no confirmed cases of anything leaked.
Nobody is misleading you because you have deeply held ideas on what words should mean.
if your definition of encrypted means telegram is an encrypted messenger, than "encrypted" is literally nothing more than a meaningless buzzword, since all messaging services do some kind of encryption.
My definition of "encrypted" means that something is encrypted. You know, using cryptography.
Your definition of encrypted means that something is end-to-end encrypted, with only two corresponding people having keys. And we actually have a term for that, it's end-to-end encryption.
I understand where you're coming from, but only one of us using this word correctly.
what do you think, are those companies committing fraud that sell water with "extra H2O", or with "more ions", just to put themselves in a better light?
Do you think McDonald's shouldn't write "careful, hot" on hot products, even if it's not literally boiling and you wish it to be boiling?
"hot" does not mean "boiling". nobody even assumes it to mean that.
Well, if you know the original McDonald's hot coffee story, it started exactly because McDonald's meant boiling, while the customers expected merely hot.
That's why precision of the language is important, ans that's why it's wrong to expect the company to use your imprecise definition of the word, that's how you get third degree burns from a cap of coffee.