“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"
I also find it really weird how aggressively Signal is being pushed everywhere, and how any criticism of it gets dismissed or ridiculed. It feels a bit like a cult at this point.
I’m fully convinced its just like apple’s support: they make some vagueish unprovable claims about privacy, and have a functional and shiny app. That’s enough for people to overlook all the privacy issues, and build a cult-like fanbase.
Like if anyone walked into a privacy conference and said, “Hey everyone, I’m going to make a private messaging service. I need everyone’s phone number!”, they’d get laughed out of the room. But because their app looks nice, then people need to develop the cult-like following whenever it gets attacked, because its touching on an unresolved cognitive dissonance of this being a terrible idea.
Pretty much yeah, and they’ve had a really good marketing campaign too. They got a whole bunch of prominent tech influencers incessantly pushing it, and it just feels like a massive astroturf campaign to me. Like you said, if a random person pitched this idea, they’d be laughed at, but you get some people with clout to do it, and it sticks because everybody respects them and trusts them.