Can you share some words that might trigger it, without doxing yourself? I have a Telegram account IDGAF about and it'd be entertaining to see if it gets zorched.
Tell HN: Telegram is most likely doing client side scanning; I quit Telegram
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Re: Tell HN: Telegram is most likely doing client side scanning; I quit Telegram
#12Talking to "unencrypted", may I ask, by default, for normal chat, all the text, image, video, sticker is uploaded to Telegram server without encryption? Or they are encrypted/hashed/salted but the decryption key is on Telegram side?
Re: Tell HN: Telegram is most likely doing client side scanning; I quit Telegram
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Re: Tell HN: Telegram is most likely doing client side scanning; I quit Telegram
#14Re: Tell HN: Telegram is most likely doing client side scanning; I quit Telegram
#15Re: Tell HN: Telegram is most likely doing client side scanning; I quit Telegram
#16I have to flag the post:
1) It is encrypted, if you initiate an encrypted chat, which is not the default.
2) The clients are open source, you can even write your own TUI around the API.
Re: Tell HN: Telegram is most likely doing client side scanning; I quit Telegram
#17Private chats aren't E2E. But anyhow, why do you think you were restricted based on specific keywords? And how does that restriction look like? Can you please check your access with @SpamBot ? Because in Telegram, if you PM someone, they have a big red button that'll block you and report you for spam - and Telegram often temporarily restricts accounts for reported unsolicited PMs.
Oh, and the title is misleading, there's no such thing done on the client side for sure.
Re: Tell HN: Telegram is most likely doing client side scanning; I quit Telegram
#18Talking to "unencrypted", may I ask, by default, for normal chat, all the text, image, video, sticker is uploaded to Telegram server without encryption? Or they are encrypted/hashed/salted but the decryption key is on Telegram side?
It's the latter, there is encryption for everything but of course Telegram has the keys. But I don't think there's information if Telegram stores data encrypted or not.
Re: Tell HN: Telegram is most likely doing client side scanning; I quit Telegram
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
Telegram user here. I’ll keep using the app with no end-to-end encryption, like usual. It’s widely known by now (I think) that Telegram doesn’t have default E2E encryption. Personally, I stay on it because of the network effect (staying on the same network as my friends).
Plus the user experience is, imo, the best in class. The client is open source in C++ which explains why it runs laps around Electron apps: https://github.com/telegramdesktop/tdesktop It's so quick and intuitive. Plus writing interactive bots for it is trivial.
I love many small features of Telegram.
Telegram had replies to messages before Messenger, WhatsApp, and probably other similar apps (they said they were "the first" or something). Replies in Telegram are very nice to use. In the chat view, you have this standard floating down-arrow which scrolls to the bottom of the chat when you click. When you see a message which is a reply, and you click the preview of the message that was replied to, you jump to it, and then the floating arrow won't take you to the bottom of the chat, but to the reply from which you've jumped. And it works for more than one jump, so you can kinda navigate chains of replies.
Also, jumping to even very old messages is much much faster than in the other chat apps. On the desktop client, when you scroll up there is a floating date at the top, when you click it, a calendar appears, there you can jump to any day in the chat, and again the jump feels instant, like no loading. On the Android app, clicking on the floating date jumps to the beginning of the day, but you also can access the calendar by a button that is shown when you are in search mode. By the way, searching also feels instant.
This year, they added a new mode of replying by quoting only a part of the message, so you can select some words from the message and reply to them (you can do it on mobile too). Another new mode is replying to messages from other chats, so for example you can quote and link to the message from group chat in some private chat.
I could go on and on about features like these.
Re: Tell HN: Telegram is most likely doing client side scanning; I quit Telegram
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
OP hints that the keyword checks are on-device, which would not be protected by e2ee.
Is the client not open source?
Kinda, not really. It’s different per version of the client. The source on GitHub is usually super out of date and it’s unlikely the distributed version is built off the GitHub source unmodified.