Telegram is known as a privacy-focused secure messaging app because it markets itself that way. However, it is often criticized by security experts, privacy advocates, and people with common sense who can understand why its claims about being privacy-friendly don't make sense. In this brief article, I'll show you all
Nothing new here. E2E is only available in one on one chats and is disabled by default.
At least Telegram has an open-source client. Very few messaging platforms can say that, and fewer have a decent UX.
It’s not perfect, but it’s got the best combination of features and multi-platform availability by quite a bit. None of the other messaging apps support all of my devices except Matrix, and Matrix doesn’t have stickers
Problem I have with matrix is that, afaik, does not currently support temporal or self destructing messages. Which is a big no-no for privacy conscious usage.
Stickers are pointless if I have no one to send them to. So I stay in telegram.
I am enjoying SimpleX chat
I tried it, and it looks decent, but there wasn’t a single person I know around.
Can you elaborate on your last sentence? Is the US more or less trustworthy than alternatives?
Less than some. The US gov has a history of forcing US-based corporations to disclose private data regardless of their policies or the law.
I can’t give you a good alternative though. I’m sure the same thing happens in many countries
A good alternative is a federated, selfhosted solution hosted in a jurisdiction unfriendly to yours.
If you want to self-host chat, Conduit (implementation of a Matrix server) is really nice. Much better than the official Matrix implementation (Synapse).
Yes!! I hosted it, indeed much lighter on resources! Broke encrypted rooms a few times, but overall was fine. However, it lacks deletion of old media and messages, so I broke it while trying to delete big media one by one (it broke displaying of ALL media). And when I reinstalled, a reinstall just didn’t launch. So… While it is 100% on me, feels like it’s still not the optimal solution if you’re constrained on disk space.
Doesn’t need to be unfriendly, just needs to not kow-tow to your jurisdiction.
Matrix does have stickers
A platform that values my privacy? Or stickers? Tough choice, I guess, except Signal has both.
It’s a messaging app, it’s useless if there is nobody to message. I dont have any friends using signal yet.
Also it doesnt work on my phone (Ubuntu touch). There used to be a community app but it’s not currently working.
I sincerely wish them success, but it’s hard to have faith that a US-based company will actually protect your privacy. Not that Telegram does either.
You don’t have to, though? 1) The E2EE Signal protocol is well-audited to be robust. 2) The app itself is FOSS, and there are a lot of eyes on it. 3) The server code is FOSS. Even if they’re lying about what code they use, it doesn’t matter because it’s E2EE. 4) If you think Signal might be bait-and-switching by building from different source code, you’d be provably wrong. They have reproducible builds, so were they to actually try this, it would be like sending up a flare to the entire security community. 5) Literally every single time OWS has been subpoenaed, the only information they’ve been able to provide is extremely basic metadata like server connection times.
You have no idea what you’re talking about, I’m sorry. There’s functionally less “trust” here than any messaging application on the planet. The network effect remark is at least valid and can be debated (although I personally have zero friends who use Telegram and at least several who use Signal). This one is just so, so wrong that it’s not even up for debate.
Thanks for the elaboration. I’m not familiar with how Signal works.
Educating yourself on topic is a good idea BEFORE you plan on arguing about it online.
Doesn’t have unlimited storage though. It’s really nice being able to jump to any of the 15,000+ images shared with a single person dating back to like 2015 within a couple seconds. I know that’s a privacy concern but nothing comes close to telegram’s searchability and the unlimited storage.
Signal
After Signal’s lie about dropping SMS support because of “engineering costs”, I really can’t believe anything else they say.
Plus the app experience sucks, it’s no better than SMS.
Are you talking about the signal from five years ago or something?
Wasn’t another explanation people mistakenly sending SMS and getting fucked when they meant to send a Signal message?
That’s not true, but even so, the whole point is to be an alternative to SMS. It provides that experience, so I’m happy.
I couldnt find a working Ubuntu touch app last i tried to use it
Ubuntu touch is dead. Are there at least native browsers for it?
Is it? I still get regular updates. Yes there are a few, i use Morph
https://www.ubuntu-touch.io/
For some reason, I thought Ubuntu touch was EOL. Probably because I tried it on a Redmi 5 and it was an unofficial 2018 build. Is the Morph browser still supported? I checked the Github page and the last changes were 3 years ago.
They still don’t have backups on iOS which is a deal-breaker for me.
Why would you use iOS if you care about privacy?
Because it’s far better for privacy than any Google-Play-Services-ridden version of Android, and sometimes in life you don’t want to have to deal with custom ROMs anymore.
But also that’s an exceptionally dumb question, because the implication is that privacy can’t matter to people who don’t go to the same precise lengths someone else does.
Honestly, my problems with Apple go beyond just the privacy issues.
Yeah, the glaring problem of having to share your phone number is gone too:
https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/6712070553754-Phone-Number-Privacy-and-Usernames
They still tie it to your ID since you need the phone number.
And we just trust them not to share your social map to NSA which they totally don’t do. Trust me bro
The NSA already has your social map from Apple, Google, Facebook/whatsapp, plus a hundred other sources you’ve given access to your contacts in the past decade.
Even if you’ve never used any of those, or given any app access to your contacts, 99% of your contacts have.
Data is about as good as it is current though and many people are reducing their exposure to these parasites
A person can now pretty easily go without logging into any of these apps with a few adjustments.
Hence why signal relationship maps will be even more valuable going forward. Hence my theory about signal…
Guess I better stick with Facebook messenger then.
/s Does that even exist still?
I’m way more concerned about the privacy of what I say than who I say it to.
That they do, but your contacts doesn’t have to get it anymore.
A self-hosted matrix stack built from source with matrix clients built from source with e2ee implemented that you yourself have the competence to verify the encryption and safety of would be the only secure communication I know of if you don’t want to trust a third party.
At the very least XMPP and Simplex, which are easier to host and lighter.
Doesn’t XMPP tend to use always-active sockets? I looked into switching my number to a VOIP service and considered jmp.chat, but I heard people complain about phone battery life. I’m going to test it out soon, but if I go that route, I may consider hosting my own XMPP server if it can handle both my phone (i.e. answer calls on my computer instead of phone) and regular IM.
And Simplex is awesome, but my issue is having the same account on multiple devices. I want to be able to see and respond to messages on my work laptop, personal laptop, personal desktop, and phone, and it seems Simplex only has basic support for it. I’m still playing with it, and I may end up switching to it, but for now, the experience isn’t very user-friendly.
I am very unfamiliar with jmp.chat and don’t use notifications, but from what I’ve heard - Conversations (with UnifiedPush notifications) isn’t that bad.
As for Simplex - a problem indeed, you effectively can’t have an account shared between devices, but I just have identical profiles on my phone and computer. Also, people have complained about it consuming battery quickly (they switch to checking for notification every set interval to save it).
But yeah - I think both are worth trying to see if maybe one of them fits you! They’re both super easy to host.
Yup. I got my SO to try out Signal as an alternative to SMS, so hopefully that works. If we can consistently use it, I’m going to nudge my other contacts (mostly my family members) to switch as well, because it’s certainly better than SMS. Signal is the most popular SMS alternative AFAICT, so it’s the safe choice.
That said, I installed Simplex on both my phones and connected them, and my kids had a blast sending messages to each other. I’m going to keep playing with it and probably host my own collection of nodes, but so far, the implementation details bleed through and kind of tarnish the user experience. I’ll keep messing with it though, and maybe we’ll end up using it as an in-house chat or something as a kind of Discord alternative. Or maybe I’ll host a Matrix node. We’ll see.