641–650 of 972 posts
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As a reminder, Telegram groups are not encrypted at all, and 1:1 chats are not encrypted by default, so while WhatsApp might see your contacts, Telegram can see most of your messages.
Let’s not forget that Telegram backdoored their encrypted chat implementation and got caught.
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Signal requires phone number in order not to store your contact list on their servers. Instead of id's/email addresses/nicknames they are using your phone contact list. IMHO that's better for privacy.
> Signal requires phone number in order not to store your contact list on their servers. That does not make sense. There is no relation between 'using phone number as id' and 'storing contact list on servers'. E-mail and same other communication protocols also do not use phone numbers and do not store contact list on servers.
I'm not an advocate for Signal, but I totally get this approach.
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Not true at all - you have no ads looking at your screen, neither chatting privately. Group/channel owners may choose to add ads, but you can always run your own client made to ignore them - telegram is open source.
Not showing you ads in 1:1 chat or in groups the maintainer has chose not to enable them in is different from, "I have your data ready to go for targeted advertisement". This is essentially the Google model. Your search queries and browsing history (and Android and Chrome) are essential to targeted ads shown on every website "the webmasters choose to enable them on".
What? Google uses all your info for creepy personalized ads. Telegram is showing the same ads to everyone in a channel. And it isn't in 1:1 chats cuz they're supposed to be non-intrusive and gives a feeling of privacy.
Who is the 'maintainer'? Telegram is the only entity here.
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This is false. No proposed ads in 1:1 or any size group chats, only large channels (which are like RSS feeds, you can join but not post). In addition 100% of Telegram traffic is encrypted over the wire (like this website, your bank, etc). The only difference with secret chats is that they're end to end encrypted. Signal is a very bad user experience if you use several devices (phone, tablet, home computer, work compu…
Telegram NON Secrete Chat are not E2E.
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> I am in the camp that there are alot of things we try to solve (and sacrifice things like usability) at a technical level that we should be solving at a social level. I agree in theory but unfortunately I think we need both. I have little confidence in either on it's own. And I've been burned too much by vendor lock-in in the past to ever advocate for ANY service that isn't federated (I use many non-federated servi…
> I should add that successful & popular federated online messaging services are something we've had since the 1960s so I have yet to see any compelling reason to be perpetuating the walled-garden approach beyond a preference for a totalitarian approach to ecosystem control. Touche, but if they were there before why aren't they "here" in popular adoption? I think, although it is perfectly technically feasible in a va…
HN is likely not the best forum for this argument, but I'd have two answers to this:
1. Email is popularly adopted. It's difficult to add improvements because it's a federated protocol from the 60s, but it is still popular.
2. The reason we haven't had popular adoption since is because: (a) email was publicly developed, whereas most newer tech is private; the market favours easy (cheap) over better (hard, expensive) and federated is harder to do (with worthwhile benefits); and (b) the major downside of centralisation -vs- federated is vendor lock-in, which is bad for users but good for shareholders.
Telegram is a great IM experience . The client is good, feature set is good, the stickers are amusing (if you're into that kind of thing), the feature set is complete and everything is polished. Telegram is, I think, going to be one of the easier sells if you're trying to convince non-technical users to switch from WhatsApp or FB Messenger. The privacy, security, and governance story is not great though. If you care…
As a reminder, Telegram groups are not encrypted at all, and 1:1 chats are not encrypted by default, so while WhatsApp might see your contacts, Telegram can see most of your messages.
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It's not that surprising. If you live in the US and don't need to text people in other countries, you probably can avoid WhatsApp pretty easily, but it's pretty much the defacto option for texting non-US family and friends, and in many countries it's the predominant form of mass communication.
UK here, have never and will never use any f c book property and didn't use Whatsapp before then. For me it's Signal, Matrix or folk can SMS me to give up their privacy without pushing me into using other services to do so.
Best software product of the past decade.
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Encryped chat might mean E2E-encrypted yes, but even then why not add those four extra letters "E2E-" and make it obvious? Besides, here is what I replied to: > As a reminder, Telegram groups are not encrypted at all [...] (emphasis mine) This is very possible to misunderstand for someone who isn't aware and the result might easily be that they stay in their abusive relationship with WhatsApp because of such FUD. As…
I still fail to see how switching from fully E2E encrypted WhatsApp to most-of-the-time NOT E2E encrypted Telegram is an improvement.
Where is the "Don't switch" option? Because as much as I hate that Facebook bought them, they're part of what I would call "critical social infrastructure." Asking to leave WhatsApp is like cancelling your contract with your ISP and going offline just because you don't like the company.