Is Telegram really an encrypted messaging app?

Do you want to say that social networks must implement E2E? Personally I think it is a good idea, but existing social networks and dating apps do not implement it so Telegram is not obliged to do it as well.

As for promises of security, everybody misleads users. Take Apple. They advertise that cloud backups are encrypted, but what they don't like to mention is that by default they store the encryption keys in the same cloud, and even if the user opts into "advanced" encryption, the contact list and calendar are still not E2E encrypted under silly excuse (see the table at [1]). If you care about privacy and security you probably should never use iCloud in the first place because it is not fully E2E encrypted. Also note, that Apple doesn't even mention E2E in user interface and instead uses misleading terms like "standard encryption".

This is not fair. Apple doesn't do E2E cloud backups by default and nobody cares, phone companies do not encrypt anything, Cloudflare has disabled Encrypted Client Hello [2], but every time someone mentions Telegram, they are blamed for not having E2E chats by default. It looks like the bar is set different for Telegram compared to other companies.

[1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/102651

[2] https://developers.cloudflare.com/ssl/edge-certificates/ech/

Because that's the trade-off you make when you want high entropy unique usernames to prevent enumeration attacks. They become long and random. There's still a "phone number". It just looks something like 4sci35xrhp2d45gbm3qpta7ogfedonuw2mucmc36jxemucd7fmgzj3ad. You know that string and you can make a computer somewhere in the world accept some GET requests. Who knows if Flask, or whatever is part of the stack, has zero-click vulnerabilities.

And yes obviously I would recommend Signal to anyone who wants content privacy. Since Signal offers only narrow by-policy metadata privacy (unless you're on burner hardware), I'd ask them if they wanted metadata privacy, and if so, I'd point them to the direction of Cwtch https://cwtch.im/. I wouldn't recommend TFC unless endpoint compromise was part of their threat model. It's complicated and nuanced in the deep end of the pool.

The correct solution to sleeping with an axe struck on the roof above your bed isn't to not worry about it because axes coming loose on their own aren't a common occurrence. Telegram has no business in peoples' personal lives and it shouldn't be collecting that data.

Plus the risk of massive data breach is insane. I'm not sure if you know about the Finnish Vastaamo Psychotherapy hack, when thousands of patients' personal lives were published in the dark web https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vastaamo_data_breach These victims are under constant extortion about that data getting spread even further. Now imagine that with close to one billion users. There is a LOT that people share on these platforms, how they unload to their close ones. Durov has no right to keep this amount of data sitting on some random server, especially given the authors' poor track record of security design.

>you should never rely on that and don’t trust any cloud-based service in general

This should be the take-away before the breach happens. But surely you agree Telegram is doing horrible job being transparent about its security, it's implying it's heavily encrypted, which laypeople assume means what end-to-end encrypted messaging provides.

>Recommending Signal might give a false sense of security.

Again, pick a lane. If you think zero click attacks of Signal are an issue but they magically disappear from Matrix clients, say so. They don't.

Decentralized system doesn't help with metadata. It's just spreading it to even more systems, every server people indiscriminately choose get a copy of groups' communication metadata, yay.

Your buddy self-hosts for you and your peers, now you have an individual with personal interest to take a peek at their peers' metadata. Not good.

There's very little a decentralized messaging platform offers other than baked-in resilience in case the company goes down. You can self-host the service.

But Signal is backed by Signal Foundation and really rich people like Brian Acton have helped it get the organization on a solid foundation. There's nothing that implies its going down.

From my PoV, I bin Element together with Signal, both provide content privacy, but no strong metadata privacy. For that you go with Cwtch, Briar, OnionShare, Ricochet Next.

Telegram is in the don't use for anything that isn't comparable to public Twitter, and since Telegram inevitably leads to misusing it, it's dangerous and bad tool. It was built to aggregate user data, and it will inevitably do that, because the masses generally don't prioritize privacy. Telegram monetizing user data is constantly one business decision away. And people using it are on borrowed time. We're not in disagreement about how it should be used, but people don't take that warning seriously, and when (not if, but when) shit hits the fan, it'll be like nothing anyone has ever seen before.