A lot of privacy guides suggest avoiding Telegram. I understand that in its default mode there’s no E2EE (and no E2EE for groups at all). If people I know don’t wanttko use Signal, isn’t Telegram the lesser evil given it’s nicer privacy policy (than other popular ones)?
Say I use the FOSS version of it.
@remindme@mstdn.social in 1 week
I find Telegram to be at least as trustworthy as Signal. Signal has a lot of red/orange flags that bother me. For example, Telegram is not based in the United States, whereas Signal is.
An app designed by US company doesn’t represent anything related to security.
The founder of telegram always complains that the FBI has access to signal, apple and other related chat apps.
He suggests to use private chat, if it is confidential. The message transactions happens between peer to peer and it doesn’t go to the server. He was claiming all the privacy feature that you get from signal is the almost same as private chat. Signal stil uses the server.
Given the fact that Signal is E2EE, “full access” would mean “full access to encrypted data without the keys to unencrypt it,” which is why E2EE is important in the first place. Were Signal compromised, US representatives would not resurrect the EARN IT Act year after year in an attempt to make E2EE illegal.
No one had provided a shred of evidence that Signal has been compromised. And given that they’re more willing to pull out of a country entirely v. compromising user data, I’d call them a pretty safe bet.
My account was compromised once, though I have 2FA enabled. I assume that I was accessing my account from a browser on a windows pc, it had virus but not 100% sure. Someone was able to access it, change my name send multiple crypto related links to users in bulk.
It contained years of chat history with my wife. I was able to recover the account. But I deleted all the chat history.
I still use it to get alerts from various automated scripts I use, mostly for the bots with free API access. No personal data go in there.
The mistake might be from my side. But if someone takes over your account, you lose everything.
Despite you using the foss client of telegram there is no source for the server, signal has published it’s code.
Depends on your goals.
For casual shit like sending files to yourself, bullshiting with memes, or stuff like that, the unknown factor of telegram doesn’t matter.
But it is an unknown. We don’t know what their server code looks like. So you can’t trust that it isn’t doing things other than what it is supposed to.
It’s a matter of preferences tbh.
We don’t know what anyones server code looks like. The code that is published may not be the one they are actually running.
In fact Signal stopped publishing server side code a few years back, and only resumed after the community got angry: https://www.androidpolice.com/2021/04/06/it-looks-like-signal-isnt-as-open-source-as-you-thought-it-was-anymore/
I don’t think that they published it as a response to the angry users. We wern’t that loud and signal had a reason to do so. That was when they worked on the cryptocurrency and the spam protection. In signals case it dosn’t matter much if the server is compromised since the important part happens on the client side. The server can only forward encrypted salad or not deliver a message. Or log the meta data of the messages. E2e will always be there, despite the server being compromised.
