Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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You may be offered a free premium Telegram subscription – but please don’t accept (archive.is)

submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Telegram is giving away FREE Premium subscriptions! All they need from you is to use your cell phone as a relay to text out their OTP codes! And the recipient of the OTP sees your phone number! What could POSSIBLY go wrong with this deal?

PLEASE don't use Telegram! I personally recommend Matrix as it's totally FOSS, you can self host, there are tons of front end clients to choose from. Or even use Signal. I have my own issues with Signal, the fact they don't allow third party clients, you can't self-host, they have a proprietary shim in their stack that only they know what it does, they were pushing crypto, etc, but at least Signal is better than this garbage.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 7 months ago (2 children)

What could POSSIBLY go wrong with this deal?

No jokes, I'd like to know. How is it different from sending sms to random numbers?

[–] [email protected] 14 points 7 months ago (1 children)

... people just send SMS to random phone numbers?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago (1 children)

No but what exactly stops anyone from doing that? A privacy consideration? I'd think it's just a waste of time at best.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

The issue here is that you could potentially read the content of a 2FA sms that wasn't intended for you. It makes it easy too break 2FA if you have many devices

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Logic suggests OTPs are locked to login sessions of corresponding users and also expire. Besides telegram would be able to tell if OTPs meant to be sent through you tend to not reach the recipients.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Yes but you can login on an account and hope you will be the one selected to send the code

[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

You mean you can try to guess someone's number before they get an OTP through you in order to be the first to log into their account?

Well then you'll also going to need their cloud password in order to find anything worth of your effort.

But anyway this is an improbable scenario, considering how vast the user base is, and if we assume telegram implemented some precautions.

Malicious service providers and cloned sim cards pose a much more serious risk if you ask me.