I’m from Mexico, and the most used chat application is WhatsApp. It’s used for EVERYTHING. I use Telegram only for contacting my family members (both my parents and my brother). They also use it only for this family chat. All my (and their) contacts use WhatsApp instead.
Now with the news that Telegram will collaborate with Twitter, I feel that I should delete it. Not that Zuck is any better than Musk, but still…
Also I don’t think it’s worth the effort to teach my parents yet another messaging app, like signal.
Collaborating with Xitter is not the most distasteful thing Telegram has done. Its marketing model has been to consistently lie to people about being encrypted when that’s only true in very limited cases. It has also catered to criminals by attempting to make it difficult to comply with legal demands for information, while holding that information for its own purposes.
Signal, on the other hand is always encrypted and does its best to hold as little information about users as possible.
Also I don’t think it’s worth the effort to teach my parents yet another messaging app, like signal.
What is there to learn? Every popular messaging app has pretty much the same UI.
Isn’t it good for a communication company to be noncompliant with people’s conversations?
Being unable to comply (signal) and selectively refusing to comply while still having access to the data (telegram) is not equivalent
“Selectively” is a new word that wasn’t mentioned in the post I replied to. I get that it’s better to not have access to the data at all, and lying to customers is shitty, etc. I use signal and not telegram. But ‘refusing to comply with demands from other groups for data access is correct behavior’ was my only argument. Nothing about equivalence
It might be correct behavior but when there are laws in place to force the company to comply, actually having the data is a problem.
It usually wasn’t conversations that were at issue. People would engage in criminals acts, such as trading child sexual abuse media in large unencrypted group chats. Law enforcement would find links to those chats, join them, and observe criminal acts, leading to court orders to Telegram to disclose whatever identifying information it had about the offenders, such as phone numbers and IP addresses.
Telegram intentionally split storage of that kind of information across jurisdictions that do not cooperate so that it was effectively impossible to obtain orders for all of them. They bragged their marketing materials that they have never complied with a court order for user information. Taken as a whole, I see that as intentionally facilitating child abuse.
Signal’s approach is pretty much the inverse; rather than hoard data about users and shield people they know have done evil, Signal has ensured that it does not know the contents of any conversation, nor anything about users other than when they created the account and most recently accessed it.
IIRC Signal stated that they can collect IPs of some users if asked by a judge but that’s about it (not retroactively). Which imo also further proves that they actually value privacy without using it as an excuse to make money from people doing truly evil shit
Switch to Signal. It’s not like there’s anything to learn, the UI isn’t all that different from WhatsApp
there’s no learning curve with Signal, it’s almost exactly like whatsapp.
but how to find groups?
Unlike the other two, there are no servers that run discoverable group chats.
exactly that’s why it will always lag behind
Its what makes it more secure. Why do you need a chat app that allows your parents to accidentally stumble into a group of con artists or kids to stumble into things they shouldn’t be exposed to? It’s a messaging app, not gamer group chat.
This is what puts is way ahead of the others.
Also, making it harder for pedophiles to find each other and groups where they can share their shit is a good way to defeat all the shitty “think about the children” laws that European countries are constantly trying to pass to make encryption illegal
For public groups you probably want something like Matrix.org instead. Also open source, also supports E2E encryption
There’s a search bar which will filter your conversations, and you can create a new group with new message (pen icon) ->new group
Here’s another comment endorsing Signal.
I’d take Telegram over WhatsApp as I find Telegram, ignoring privacy concerns, is an excellent messenger. Much better than WhatsApp
But, Signal’s pretty great.
I hate Facebook but isn’t WhatsApp end to end encrypted by default? I know telegram is not.
Yes, but it’s not open source and it’s Meta so I don’t have a lot of trust there. Plus you can always just activate the Secret Chat feature on Telegram for E2E encryption that I’d just more than WhatsApp’s.
facebook bought it for billions, they gotta recover the money somehow?
End to end encrypted doesn’t mean they don’t potentially store a copy of the keys somewhere. With proprietary software, you never know what it’s actually doing since you can’t verify the code does what it says on the tin.
Can you use signal?
Telegram was developed by Russians and HQ is in United Arab Emirates. They have always been sketchy af.
Telegram’s owners are at odds with the Russian government though, hence the move to another country.
There’s plenty of problems with Telegram without having to resort to Russophobia already.For example their chats aren’t even E2E-encrypted by default and afaik there’s no way to have encrypted group chats either.
I’ve heard good things about Signal, maybe try that?
Also I don’t think it’s worth the effort to teach my parents yet another messaging app, like signal.
My friend, just set up Signal on their phones, put it in place of the Telegram app and watch them not even notice anything changed.
Not if they’re the kind of users my parents are. An update moves a button from the bottom-left to the bottom-right and suddenly “the app you gave me is broken again”.
Also, don’t sneak-change things on other people’s phones.
I really distrust telegram. There are some many dark patterns around it and the server is closed source so I’d say the distrust is very well deserved.
has there been cases where telegram chat been leaked/compromised?
Many. One particularly awful case is how at the beginning of ruzi invasion of Ukraine a lot several Russian resistance figures were compromised through Telegram due to it using phone numbers for security which are incredibly insecure and needless to say in control of the government.
If you get rid of Telegran, at least you’d only have one shitty messenger instead of two.
I personally avoid telegram for anything sensitive or personal. Because there is no end to end encryption. You should move to Signal.
It’s actually easier to switch over if you’re using a specific app just for family chats. Imagine trying to convince them to switch if they used telegram to communicate with everyone else as well. I’d say take the chance and switch over to Signal while you still can. I moved my family over from viber to signal a long time ago and the transition wasn’t as hard as I expected.
Threema. And don’t forget, real privacy and security, with centralized services, is never free. The app is tested by third party and is open source. And, you don’t have to share your phone number, unlike with Signal.
You no longer have to share your phone number in signal. They added a unique user identifier a while ago that you can share to add new contacts. This is not permanent by the way, you can change this user identifier anytime.
I’ve been all in on telegram for some time now. Signal just doesn’t feel like it’s iterating fast enough. Few years ago, telegram was blazing through and signal was just a disgusting UI meant to make you feel good that you’re using encryption. That has changed.
The xAI news is a pretty big nail in the coffin. But literally every other alternative is shit. WhatsApp is fully owned and definitely farmed by Zuck for data. Their claims of encryption have eroded by everything they’ve done in AI.
Signal is definitely said to be encrypted. But you can bet there’s a back door in there. Specially with all the recent scrutiny on it in the news, hackers are figuring out ways in.
What’s even left to use?
Sorry, don’t have a solution for you. But the world is ready for another messenger - one that actually cares about people and brings features that people like. Heck, I’ll even pay for it, just like I’ve been paying for telegram.
Signal is definitely said to be encrypted. But you can bet there’s a back door in there. Specially with all the recent scrutiny on it in the news, hackers are figuring out ways in.
Wow: you know nothing.
- security at Telegram is amateur hour
- the Signal protocol (used by Signal & WhatsApp) is open source, auditable by anyone, and has been audited by security researchers
Care to elaborate? I’m not on anyone’s side here but this was a weak argument. I’m sure there’s a name for that kind of fallacy.
An observation isn’t a fallacy: not an ounce of anything firm to substantiate what they wrote, just impression & hot takes.
Sneaky edit, there…
My point was that all you wrote was “you know nothing” as if that is enough to refute anything.
“you know nothing” as if that is enough to refute anything
Not really. Man, that comment is so painfully misinformed it wows me isn’t really an argument.
Sneaky edit, there…
Let’s review timestamps:
- mine
Created: Sunday, June 1st, 2025 at 1:27:38 AM GMT-04:00
Modified Sunday, June 1st, 2025 at 1:58:50 AM GMT-04:00 - yours
Sunday, June 1st, 2025 at 2:01:03 AM GMT-04:00
A change before your input.
A change before your input.
Fair enough, it was edited while I was typing my comment I guess, so silly of me to assume.
isn’t really an argument
There’s an implied argument there that they’re wrong about something, obviously. The implication is so strong that if you didn’t mean to make an argument, it was pretty confusing.
But if you really insist, fair enough to that as well. 🤷♂️
- mine
there’s no backdoor in signal, this is pure FUD. give us even a single source
Did I say there’s a back door? My bad. I meant, there’s probably a zero say that we don’t even know about.
you could say that about literally any project. is the zero day in the room with us together with the alleged hackers living in the server room?
Signal just doesn’t feel like it’s iterating fast enough.
Development is always a lot harder when you need to consider all the privacy aspects. When you don’t, you can be Telegram and give fancy features real fast.
you can bet there’s a back door in there
I mean you can educate yourself about cryptography and find the “backdoor”, the source code is out there for both the server and the client. And I assure you there are a lot of people in academia who would love to do that and get lots of citations, but no one has ever done so, so maybe there is none? That is if we don’t consider all the security audit commisioned by Signal itself on its app/server.
As someone who actually works in a security conscious environment, there is no and never will be perfect security. All you can do is layers.
Think of it as two perpetually competing things: effort and motivaion. One is your security, the other is how valuable your data is for hackers, companies or an overmilitarized government (eg any developed nation).
If you’re dealing in highly illegal stuff, you will likely get all the attention, which you’d need to be paranoid about. In our current politics its fair to say being for human rights can come near that soon. In average circumstances, only data brokers and other capitalists will try to attach to your data which in turn leak it to the government without a warrant btw.
Security layers work like this: you build individual layers of independent security measures which might be breached but only reveal the next layer which slows down any attacker. Think front door, room door, safe. The important detail is that you don’t put all the keys under the front door mat.
Example: you should (obviously) not post your address, bank account, email, etc on the public web. Its not much but doing that you would absolutely not need to care because you’re already sharing it for free and will likely be ruined soon.
Then you might want to be selective of your tools. Messaging, data storage (ie cloud), AI, social media. Posting pictures of you and your family on vacation or at home for everyone to see is just asking for brokers to gobble it up.
In private messaging, the word private is very relative. On certain phones, the phone itself reads your screen and tries to suggest things based on the messages you write. On that base, you really dont need to bother about anything other than the script kiddie on the starbucks wifi. You can bet that the phone will share that info if you let it.
So if you need actual privacy because you might say something that isnt exactly legal but not highly illegal as to warrant busting down your door: you might want to switch OSs first on both your phone and computers. It’s not perfect but running mint and lineageos (or graphene) you at least dont have the monopolist on data collection directly embedded in your phone. Apples ios does read your screen last i checked so they’re out if you want privacy.
Then you can bother about a messaging app. Meta is out. Forget it. Signal is what most people with privacy needs use since it is easy, open source, provided by a nonprofit. The biggest issues are that it is centralized so technically they could be taken down or maybe implement a backdoored encryption. But at that point most efforts will be for naught so lets assume that is not the case for now.
People with technical interests use matrix, which is also used by the german military, decentralized and rather popular in some countries. It’s not perfect either since the metadata still leak afaik which means someone can try to identify you and guess your texts in some cases. But of course it is insanely different from whatsapp in terms of control and probability of a breach through meta.
You can use a variety of other messaging apps like simplex chat or even decentralized wireless communication like meshtastic. Its literally impossible to know all the different avenues you can take. So that at least makes it fucking complicated to get all your data, provided you dont back it up on icloud or google. You can even route your messages through hybrid networks of wireless and wired networks if you wish.
Then of course you can pack it all inside a vpn which will depend on your strategy and maybe vendor. Just vpning home helps to make your messages very hard to decrypt at the starbucks but if someone listens on your isp, they can still see who you might be communicating with.
Then there is the matter of google services and push notifications. If you want real privacy, you dont use google services at all and either a privacy concious provider or even nothing. That would mean no outside notifications and only regular or manual checks.
Well said! I’ll add that OP should consider their “threat model”, that is, who you’re trying to defend against.
Different attackers may require different defenses. Your comment about security in layers is apt here.
French gov also uses a matrix fork
As for WhatsApp, it’s true that being Meta they collect everything they can, mostly metadata, but don’t they still implement the same end-to-end encryption as Signal? So, at least the actual content is your messages and calls should be truly private, i.e. out of reach even of Meta (and let’s say, all of this using a phone with no google e.g. graphene or lineage or calyxos). Please correct me if I’m wrong.
I don’t know about the algorithm but the app could be able to read the contents and open them up to scrutiny by meta. I wouldnt put it beyond them, especially since the signal app is open source and whatsapp isnt so we wouldnt know.
Specially with all the recent scrutiny on it in the news, hackers are figuring out ways in.
I’m assuming you mean the US gov’t debacle? It’s already been proven that they were using a fork, not the genuine Signal app. The fork was built with a back door. As far as I’m aware (and please correct me if I’m wrong) Signal has yet to be hacked and is currently among the most secure options.
It’s almost like the US gov’t might benefit from convincing its citizens that the fully encrypted messaging app is dangerous so they should just go back to Whatsapp and Telegram.
From what I understand, there was no hack nor fork in the recent news about Signal, it was human error, somebody literally invited the wrong person to the chat 🙄
Signal is still secure.
Haha yep inviting the wrong person was absolutely the big issue. I think I read something about it being an unofficial fork out of Israel though, but everything moves so fast these days it’s hard to keep up
BS. The US govt actively tells people to use Signal. Take what you will from that.
And there was a recent report about groups and QR codes. And another about CDN. Look em up.
