I have not found any news article on this on a whim. Because my friends and family, I need to use Facebook Messenger, and Messenger Lite was a OK client - lightweight, no unnecessary features, etc., compared to the regular Messenger app.
Now I'm a little torn, having a Meta app on my phone is already bad, but having to downgrade to the bloated Messenger app? Not sure I will make a change. What are your thoughts?
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Unfortunately FB Messenger is the defacto way to communicate in some countries - if I refused to use it I'd fail uni as I wouldn't be able to communicate with group members, I wouldn't be able to contact most of my family, and the number of friends I can talk to would drop to about 5 (of which most have recently had children and are thus a bit preoccupied)
Really bad advice. Trading Meta app for Meta app. It is proprietary so you can be sure WhatsApp does not have encryption like Signal
Where can I get info on Telegram storing messages in plain text on their servers? I have asked and searched and all I have seen are hypotheticals but nothing concrete.
I've read through the audit they had in 2020 where cloud chats are encrypted using the same MT Proto 2.0 which they also use for the secret chats (E2EE).
The same way that evidence is available, I would also like to see the evidence of cloud chats stored in plain text and not encrypted.
You mentioned "plain text" specifically - where else would they be holding those plain texts?
So far, there is no evidence to suggest your messages are stored in plain text. And in 2015, Telegram was using MTProto 1.0 for their cloud chat encryption and Secret Chats E2EE. It's been about 5-6 years since they've upgraded to MTProto 2.0 which has been proven to be a sound encryption protocol.
It was Moxie Marlinspike that also made the claim messages are stored in plain text on Telegram's server with no evidence. And so far, the only thing we have are hypotheticals and nothing of substance to support that claim.
The audit done in 2020 goes over how Telegram encrypts their cloud chats and those encryption keys are not stored on the same servers. While E2EE is preferable, the reason why Telegram works the way it does is because how messages are handled by default.
Hopefully soon they will roll out Secret Group chats. But I do like we all have the option to use Telegram however we want.
Messenger supports end-to-end encrypted chats, and more encryption features are rolling out. https://messengernews.fb.com/2023/08/22/expanding-testing-for-end-to-end-encryption-on-messenger/. It's a huge project to implement encryption given the number of features that have to be rewritten (e.g. scraping URLs to show a preview picture now has to be done client-side rather than server-side)
You (op) use telegram, and make a relay bot that redirects messages to/from fb messenger. You use the app of your choice, and they use the app of theirs. Big downside, is you're still reliant on fb for messages.
I know of someone who made one a while back, but I don't know if it would work with the current version of messenger. It'd be a fun project to figure that out, though. I'll add it to the growing list of fun projects haha