Nobody privacy in mind should ever use it in India since Telegram had agreed to comply PM's surveillance policy.
this post was submitted on 05 Nov 2023
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Privacy
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I'm not paying for Telegram and I haven't noticed missing out anywhere because of it. I'm using the APK file instead of the Play Store version because the latter censors Russian media channels (and I hate censorship). I wasn't even aware there were premium accounts.
I'm in 2 dozen channels, have a few friends who mainly use Telegram instead of the competitors and I haven't noticed a single issue, except for their homegrown encryption scheme.
Telegram does send number verification texts to non-premium accounts. That's how people get onboarded into telegram.
Telegram is on f Droid, and the source code is on GitHub, for their open source client. You can build the client right now.
I noticed another commenter said it's not end to end encrypted, the open source client and the secret chats are end to end encrypted, but they are not the default.
Telegram has been leaking your IP to your chats and calls for months: https://techcrunch.com/2023/11/03/psa-chat-call-apps-reveal-ip-address/
It's encryption algorithm (only used in secret chats BTW) is proprietary which is huge a red flag.
Last time I checked, the secret chats had some severe downsides that make them unusable as normal chats.
And if you want to bring open-source to the conversation: Signal is AGPL licensed, both the apps and backend. Not that it matters because of the E2E encryption.
I agree signal is superior, but this post is about telegram.
What are the downsides of the secret chats?
https://www.securemessagingapps.com/
In the comparison chart telegram's not ideal, but it's far from the worst.
Telegram does have a lot of benefits that simplex and signal don't. Nearly a billion people have it installed. You can connect to people using just aliases without giving away your phone number. So there is utility there
One downside is that secret chats are mobile-only. Not supported at all on PCs and laptops, with the official client at least.
That's inconvenient, I admit.
There's a certain philosophy saying that secret chats not being portable is more secure. That means you're not exporting the secret keys to multiple devices. I realize signal achieves this by signing the secret chats with multiple keys instead of passing the key around. It does reduce your risk surface.
I agree without, Telegram secret chats are annoying and due to some bug I can't even select text and/or accept spell checking corrections on my iPhone. Signal however... that's just e piece of shit messenger that never syncs anything properly between devices without delays, errors etc. and for what's worth their desktop applications aren't native and I fucking hate electron shit.
Why can't we just get over the chat app mess we're in and bring back XMPP with encryption? I don't get most of the people here, all for federation and shit but when it comes to messages they suddenly forget that XMPP is the original and truly open messaging solution. You can message anyone by email no matter what's or where's their server. Pretty much like lemmy, true interoperability.
For what it's worth I never have syncing issues with signal. It might be due to the iPhone deprioritizing it in the background, you might want to check your phone settings
Telegram is not sending text messages because I don't have a premium account.
Did they say that on the UI? Or why do you think that? I don't think that's the cause.
And many features are locked in premium.
Sure, there are a few new features that were only added for premium users, but I don't know about any that was available to everyone and then became premium only. Or am I wrong?
Do you guys ever feel that telegram has become so much worse?
Well, about that. While I don't think the above concerns are valid, in the last few years telegram has did things and durov made such announcements that are at least weird, but actually concerning, and don't make me trust them more with their motives.
Right now I'm waiting for Element's technical upgrade of Matrix.
Yeah. They say it on the UI.
That's very weird. You are trying to message an average account, right? Could you please upload a screenshot (with sensitive into redacted of course), do I can see what's the problem? Maybe it's just a misunderstanding.
Oh, so they are not requiring premium for sending messages to a specific user, but for recovering an account with an inaccessible email address?
Or why do they want to reset the email through SMS?
Who knows ? Everything is meaningless...
I've never used Telegram until recently. I keep receiving spam on it all the time.
Weird. I never get spam on telegram. How are people adding you? Are you discoverable? Are you letting people add you by phone number?
I'll have to check
Edit: everything is set so only my contacts can contact me. But I still get random messages.
Maybe because they already have your phone number.
I'd be very surprised.
Well that's the thing about spammers, they'll just try to connect to every phone number.. when they find a match, they can put that in a list, and sell it to other people
Spam from Telegram? Or from random users? You might need to change the configurations so no one can message you without your phone number maybe.
From random users. Maybe. I'm not to familiar with Telegram and honestly I don't know a lot of people on that platform so I barely ever use it except to block users lol
Telegram doesn't have proper E2E encryption, so why are you using it for text messages at all? Asking this in privacy seems a bit weird to me.
The secret chats are E2EE. And I am not using it to send text messages. I am saying that Telegram is not sending me a text message login code because I do not have a premium account.