this post was submitted on 08 May 2024
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Privacy
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Telegram: There are backdoors in Signal encryption!
Also Telegram: not encrypted
Telegram secret chats are e2e encrypted though
But extremely hard to use to the point that nobody uses them. I send a secret chat to someone and they write me back in the unencrypted chat.
It shouldn't be possible to send anything unencrypted
Tbf not all the chats being E2E encrypted is a UX compromise. It makes Telegram a lot nicer to use across devices and allows just accessing your messages from anywhere without needing your phone to be on. Plus no need to back up chats etc. because they're all just on the server. As opposed to secret chats, which of course are bound to one particular device and can only be accessed from there.
I'm all for E2E by default but I must say I actually like the idea of having a choice in this particular case.
There's no reason for secret chsts to not be stored on the server and to not be synced to all your devices. We've had double ratchet for a while. Telegram rolling their own crypto is dumb for many reasons
Correct me if I'm wrong, but even with double ratchet, retrieving and decrypting the message history is tricky / impossible, no? Afaik signal does allow you to receive new messages on multiple "linked devices", but a new linked device doesn't have access to any messaging history.
That behavior would be a major improvement to telegram
From a privacy POV, sure, not trying to argue that. Just saying that Telegram does have a bunch of features like that that wouldn't really work if all chats were always E2E encrypted, so there's a reason that it's opt-in. Whether it's a good one or not is up to you to decide for yourself.
Though I definitely think that Telegram could do a much better job explaining the trade-off, especially in a world where many major messengers are always e2e encrypted, and people somewhat expect it to be the default.
But for some reason they don't develop features for e2ee like the other chats. Perhaps it's just hard
It's encrypted though?
You are trusting their server security and them as a company, sure, but it is encrypted against the server for sure.
It's not as good as ir could be but that's no reason to spread misinformation.