this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2024
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Privacy
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I'm still confused about people who consider telegram a private chat.
It's easy to verify for yourself that it isn't, so how is this still going around?
Telegram isn’t E2E encrypted and the telegram company can access all your messages, however, just think about the bigger picture there. How come that the E2E encrypted WhatsApp, Signal and whatnot never had their CEOs arrested for not moderating content / enabling criminal activity? Think about that.
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here. You start by agreeing that telegram is simply not private. Then you move on to implying that it must be, because the CEO got arrested?
How does that change the fact that it is, by your own assessment, not private?
To answer your question, the answer from my perspective is quite simple. Noncompliance. If telegram had complied to local laws, like the others have and continue to do, he would not have gotten in trouble.
Exactly you're getting there. Now let me ask something, if Facebook/Apple/Signal/Matrix comply with such laws how private are they? Those companies will happily censor chats and hand records to the govt, Telegram won't.
Now you can argue that they do hand info the the govts but it is all encrypted and whatnot... do you really trust there aren't backdoors there? Or cleaver ways to get around it like what we saw with push notifications or macOS analytics?
Govts are only after Telegram because they can't infiltrate the company, ask for data etc. If Signal was really as secure and private like everyone says it is then their executives would already be in jail and whatnot for "enabling criminal activities".
Not much of this makes sense. Maybe we don't have an equal understanding of private. If thats the case, this discussion is going nowhere.
I will point out, though, that this is particularly nonsensical
Telegram doesn't use encryption. Everything is in clear text. Nobody needs a back door to get access. Not even governments. It's all just out in the open
This isn't even true, Telegram isn't IRC. Like any modern application, uses SSL (encapsulated in MTProto) to protect connections. Govts will only have access if they manage to compromise those certificates, like your bank's website.
Or if they copy the data from the servers, as it isn't e2e, the data is unencrypted on the server (or usually encrypted on the server with keys accesible by people working there) as far as I know.
It doesn't have anything to do with what "everyone says". We don't do that with security. Well, Telegram users do, but Charles Darwin wrote about that process. Others look at what academics say or are competent enough themselves (no, you are not).
Every encryption is secure until someone breaks it. Like we saw on Wifi (WPA2 and WPS) or the push notification issue it may not even be a direct attack to the cryptography of something, may be a way around it.