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After Delhi High Court ruling, Telegram discloses personal details of users

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Re: After Delhi High Court ruling, Telegram discloses personal details of users

#61
post #57
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, most. Like Signal for example. Even without security you can't migrate between android and iphone or have multiple devices with the same account. But they have crypto amd stories now lol.

All the hating on Signal but for me it's the best and fits my threat model. I live in the UK and by all accounts I'm pretty unremarkable - I want privacy but not overly worried about anonymity, I also wanted something that I could persuade family and friends to use. Signal works perfectly in my use case, my friends and family happily switched over to it where when I tried to help my parents set up Matrix it was super…

Signal is great until your family member's phone breaks, and you have to explain to them that their messages are gone forever. Allow us to choose to enable backups, Signal!

Re: After Delhi High Court ruling, Telegram discloses personal details of users

#62
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes. yes yes. yes. yes 100%. the same reason i avoid whatsapp and signal like the plague. "mobile number" is in itself a big identifier when you are living in a place where you have o do mandatory KYC so that the government knows which each mobile number is linked to the actual human being. i dont care signal doesnt hold any messages. the government can ask for my number and they can use the xkcd spanner method to do…

Sure, but couldn't you just use a disposable number? (Assuming you live in a place where you can buy SIM cards without showing a personal ID, which is most countries.) That's a minor inconvenience compared to not being able to communicate with most people who use these mainstream networks. I'm more worried about the lack of encryption and trustworthiness aspect of them than giving away a phone number.

The are no disposable numbers in many countries anymore. On the top of that you are just generating even more signal than using a single number.

People have to understand that meta-data about you is almost as important as data.

For example just the fact that your phone has signal or telegram installed is meta-data that helps to identify you. They do not need to know your name.

And for bonus:

https://www.justsecurity.org/10311/michael-hayden-kill-peopl...

Re: After Delhi High Court ruling, Telegram discloses personal details of users

#63
post #2

Don't use messengers that ask for your phone number and aren't end-to-end encrypted. Use services that store as little data as possible. If data is stored, it can be given away and I would assume that it will be given away. Telegram disguises itself as encrypted chat app, when it is actually just a regular centralized plaintext messenger that has an encryption feature that nobody uses.

> Telegram disguises itself as encrypted chat app, when it is actually just a regular centralized plaintext messenger that has an encryption feature that nobody uses.

Best description of Telegram that I've seen so far.

I do trust Signal to keep the phone numbers safe with their methodology for doing that, but probably wouldn't anyone else.

Re: After Delhi High Court ruling, Telegram discloses personal details of users

#64

Quoted post unavailable.

>What's your threat model that you can't use conventional channels to communicate stuff? If you shouldn't be saying it, don't say it. If you're being censored, perhaps there's a reason why.

A single joint will get you a long time in jail in this part of Europe, as well as your name in the papers, probable loss of job, etc. Two hours away by car - decriminalised as fuck. I often ask myself the "reason why" even many US States, Potugal, Holland and now even fucking Thailand are more liberal than here. Anyway, hence the secrecy on my part, and I don't even use the stuff.

Re: After Delhi High Court ruling, Telegram discloses personal details of users

#65
post #61
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All the hating on Signal but for me it's the best and fits my threat model. I live in the UK and by all accounts I'm pretty unremarkable - I want privacy but not overly worried about anonymity, I also wanted something that I could persuade family and friends to use. Signal works perfectly in my use case, my friends and family happily switched over to it where when I tried to help my parents set up Matrix it was super…

Signal is great until your family member's phone breaks, and you have to explain to them that their messages are gone forever. Allow us to choose to enable backups, Signal!

PLease no. If someone compromises one of the contacts in a large chat group's google password or whatnot, they now have the entire message and media history from me to the chat group? This is exactly why iMessage is so useless for security - one compromise on one person's apple ID and all their groups have all their messages compromised going forward.

Re: After Delhi High Court ruling, Telegram discloses personal details of users

#66
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes. yes yes. yes. yes 100%. the same reason i avoid whatsapp and signal like the plague. "mobile number" is in itself a big identifier when you are living in a place where you have o do mandatory KYC so that the government knows which each mobile number is linked to the actual human being. i dont care signal doesnt hold any messages. the government can ask for my number and they can use the xkcd spanner method to do…

This is silly. You adopt practice based on your threat model. Threat models presuming the government can just torture information out of you also mean that any system will give you away - you're either completely anonymous or not, but if you use a messenger of any kind from your home internet IP address, then they'll come pick you up. Telecom companies have full records of who had what IP, for what duration and when…

Exactly. You need to manage to be indistinguishable from p50 users if you are serious about anonymity. This is much more difficult than using strong encryption and matrix instead of signal.

Re: After Delhi High Court ruling, Telegram discloses personal details of users

#68
How many times does it have to be said - Companies are not immune to court orders, CEOs wont do 10 years hard time so that your phone number or ip address or even unencrypted content isnt handed over in a police investigation in return for $5.99 a month.

Re: After Delhi High Court ruling, Telegram discloses personal details of users

#69
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://telegram.org/ > Private > Telegram messages are heavily encrypted and can self-destruct.

But they are encrypted. I think you're looking for e2ee, which it advertises only for Secret Chats.

Transport encryption does not make it private. Optional e2ee is as good as no e2ee. And they rolled their own crypto... For some reason my non-technical friends still would be very surprised to learn that Whatsapp is more private than Telegram.
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