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New Upcoming Telegram Premium Features

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Re: New Upcoming Telegram Premium Features

#31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

signal and telegram are a no brainer when it comes to totalitarian regimes. i live in Kashmir which has historically and continues to hunt down dissidents with agility. i cannot imagine being tied to my "mobile number" when the government has that data by law, tying a telegram/signal account to it is a gone case by that point. people who go with signal call it "better whatsapp without facebook tracking" but just like…

You can't have a Telegram account without a phone number, can you? So the difference is merely whether it's your user identifier?

that is what i wrote. matrix does not by design force users to submit a mobile number while everyone else does because they want to use that for social graph, etc etc.

Re: New Upcoming Telegram Premium Features

#33
post #4

> Changes in WhatsApp’s privacy policy had directed users to use Telegram. This is quite ironic. Telegram managed to sell itself as a more private Whatsapp while in reality it is WAY worse in this area. Amazing and sad.

Telegram has a great thing working in its favor: it is mostly free of censorship, particularly of the kind that reacts to Western do-gooder sensibilities. I have learnt more about the Ukraine war from Telegram channels (Gruz 200, Truha, some local ones) than from all of the Western press combined. Analysts like Bellingcat, CIT and ISW keep citing Telegram channels as sources. Both DNR/LNR "separatists" and Ukrainian regular and irregular fighters are putting out a lot of unfiltered info on TG.

The idea that Telegram is in any way safer than the other platforms, I really don't see much to speak for it.

It's similar to ProtonMail: you get it as a backup in case you get locked out of your googlemail; you don't get it to conspire.

Re: New Upcoming Telegram Premium Features

#34
post #14

Voice to Text transcription is worth it in itself. I hate when people send me voice messages: it's slightly less effort for them in exchange for much more annoyance and wasted time for me.

Or: an option to turn off support for audio messages. Disabling the send audio message button.

I believe everyone would disable (even those who insist in sending voice messages) and the feature would die.

Re: New Upcoming Telegram Premium Features

#36
post #4

> Changes in WhatsApp’s privacy policy had directed users to use Telegram. This is quite ironic. Telegram managed to sell itself as a more private Whatsapp while in reality it is WAY worse in this area. Amazing and sad.

It's not worse, aside from chats being unencrypted by default.

I've had suggestions on Instagram of people who I never got in touch with, only because my wife, who has no FB account, is in the same WhatsApp group as these people. They mixed in a bunch of other "you may know" people to make it less obvious, but when comparing her groupchat and my suggestions, it's clear they made links via IPs and phone numbers. At least Telegram isn't big enough (not yet, anyway) to cross correlate data to ID users like that to create such privacy concerns. FB? No, thanks.

Re: New Upcoming Telegram Premium Features

#37

I love Telegram. Their desktop client is just a million times better than WhatsApp. Everything business I do with Telegram. Everything personal goes through WhatsApp. Privacy, encryption, tracking etc. I don't care about. All the messengers suck in this perspective..

>Privacy, encryption, tracking etc. I don't care about. All the messengers suck in this perspective..

How is Signal not far better, here?

Re: New Upcoming Telegram Premium Features

#38
post #4

> Changes in WhatsApp’s privacy policy had directed users to use Telegram. This is quite ironic. Telegram managed to sell itself as a more private Whatsapp while in reality it is WAY worse in this area. Amazing and sad.

Anything Facebook-made and “privacy” doesn’t belong in the same sentence.

And yet it’s top comment at the moment in the HN of all places.

Talk about irony.

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