this post was submitted on 08 May 2024
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Privacy
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I can't read it because of the paywall but IIRC (based on a similar article) that was such a nothing-burger issue.
People turned on an entirely optional (I think off by default setting) for some feature that allowed discovery of users by location ... and shocked pikachu they could be tracked or something like that.
Here ya go.
It’s not nothing if Telegram makes people believe they only share their location in a limited manner, but instead broadcast it to the whole world. That’s a serious breach of trust. I don’t know why Telegram users keep making excuses for that platform.
Honestly? Because the others are just so bad.
If someone took Telegram's UX and feature set and paired that with Signal's approach of "everything is encrypted", that would be a winner. I kinda hope someday Telegram just does that and moves everything to E2EE. When Telegram was launched E2EE for group chats/at scale wasn't really a thing ... now it's not nearly as novel but nobody has deployed E2EE with a feature set like Telegram's.
That's not even what happens by the way. It's just that you can spoof a device into random locations and eventually figure out where someone is.
I mean it’s pretty bad to practice mass surveillance.
https://mastodon.social/@alshafei/112413115927959085
A "toot" isn't a very persuasive piece of journalism.
That claim needs a lot more investigation and context. At the very least, it needs investigated by a credible third party.
Also, do you even know what the feature you're criticizing is? A "channel"? Because it's not even really a part of the messaging portion of Telegram. It's basically an in-app blogging platform.
She links to a news article: https://www.saudigazette.com.sa/article/641746/SAUDI-ARABIA/Etidal-Telegram-remove-over-16-million-extremist-contents-in-early-2024
I don’t think Telegram denies doing mass surveillance. They might deny targeting queer groups and claim to only target extremist, whatever that means.
That news article talks nothing about targeting groups unfairly and only talks about removal of extremist activity from what's a social media platform (which is standard practice for all social media platforms). Specially that article talks about targeting "combating the online propaganda of ISIS, Hay'at Tahrir Al-Sham, and Al-Qaeda" which I believe is uncontroversial for all decent and reasonable people.
I’m sure the Saudis are super fair and would not dream of targeting queer people.
"I told you so!" - "No you didn't!" - (mutual distrust forever)
If that's your bar for gaslighting I hate to tell you I can just edit my messages all over the place to say things that were never said.
Skill issue. Get real friends who don't do this shit.
What polish and features is signal missing?
And probably several other things I've forgotten because ... basically nobody I know is still using Signal.
Thanks for the detailed reply. Signal does have location sharing and invite links, FWIW.
Signal's location share AFAIK can't be a live location share (which is useful during events like amusement park trips and stuff)
They have invite links to group chats? I don't know how that would work
It works about the same as any other app's group invite link. It can be set to automatically add the person or be treated as a request to join that needs approval.
Huh... That I did not know, thanks for the info. I'm not sure how that works with their encryption model
Yea, I couldn't tell you the specifics. I know new members of group chats don't see any previous messages. I think it might re-negotiate the keys every time someone is added. It's probably not meant to scale up to very large groups (tho I've never tried), but I've noticed no issues in 25ish people chats.
Also Simplex.chat