“Telegram is not a private messenger. There’s nothing private about it. It’s the opposite. It’s a cloud messenger where every message you’ve ever sent or received is in plain text in a database that Telegram the organization controls and has access to it”
“It’s like a Russian oligarch starting an unencrypted version of WhatsApp, a pixel for pixel clone of WhatsApp. That should be kind of a difficult brand to operate. Somehow, they’ve done a really amazing job of convincing the whole world that this is an encrypted messaging app and that the founder is some kind of Russian dissident, even though he goes there once a month, the whole team lives in Russia, and their families are there.”
" What happened in France is they just chose not to respond to the subpoena. So that’s in violation of the law. And, he gets arrested in France, right? And everyone’s like, oh, France. But I think the key point is they have the data, like they can respond to the subpoenas where as Signal, for instance, doesn’t have access to the data and couldn’t respond to that same request. To me it’s very obvious that Russia would’ve had a much less polite version of that conversation with Pavel Durov and the telegram team before this moment"
And WhatsApp is worse. It fails to include a libre software license text file. We do not control it. It is never secure.
I don’t think this really makes sense as the leading point. More like “It’s run by Meta and who knows what kind of backdoor they put in”
Yeah, it uses the signal protocol, but who’s to say they don’t have a secret member of every conversation.
I think WhatsApps biggest risk is the metadata. They know every group you are in and who else is in that group. They know when messages are sent and to who. They know where you are at all times, and probably have access to your libraries as well if you didn’t specifically restrict that. It’s a huge trove of data, which one would assume is freely shared with governments on request.
I have a credible source that says they’re scanning media being sent. They have a CSAM or related department. No idea how that works but I heard it exists. Can’t find anything about it on the internet however to confirm
Worse with an asterisk. For making contents encrypted - no, anything else - yes
I wouldn’t say it’s worse. It technically claims to have end-to-end encryption while telegram doesn’t. I wouldn’t trust it at all because it’s from Meta, but I don’t see how you can say the one at least claiming to have encryption is worse than the one that just flat out doesn’t have it.
End to end encryption is worth nothing when WhatsApp have access to the encryption key. And the fact that all photos you see on WhatsApp are saved on your phone without encryption means that it’s only encrypted when it’s sent, nowhere else.
I also have very suspicious examples of advertising linked to WhatsApp conversations.
Exactly. Meta is fine with What’sApp having E2EE, because they can still spy at the endpoints
Yes, it’s not good. We’re talking about if it is worse than telegram though. Not if it’s simply good or not.
I thought I was pretty fucking clear on that in my original comment?
From my perspective, I’d rather have an enemy of country to have my personal data. It’s far harder to use for them than for my country.