“Telegram is not a private messenger. There’s nothing private about it. It’s the opposite. It’s a cloud messenger where every message you’ve ever sent or received is in plain text in a database that Telegram the organization controls and has access to it”

“It’s like a Russian oligarch starting an unencrypted version of WhatsApp, a pixel for pixel clone of WhatsApp. That should be kind of a difficult brand to operate. Somehow, they’ve done a really amazing job of convincing the whole world that this is an encrypted messaging app and that the founder is some kind of Russian dissident, even though he goes there once a month, the whole team lives in Russia, and their families are there.”

" What happened in France is they just chose not to respond to the subpoena. So that’s in violation of the law. And, he gets arrested in France, right? And everyone’s like, oh, France. But I think the key point is they have the data, like they can respond to the subpoenas where as Signal, for instance, doesn’t have access to the data and couldn’t respond to that same request.  To me it’s very obvious that Russia would’ve had a much less polite version of that conversation with Pavel Durov and the telegram team before this moment"

  • ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.netEnglish
    171·
    3 days ago

    We as a community should, in my opinion, pick a “good enough” solution for the majority of the people we interact with.

    I’d probably suggest Deltachat. It’s decentralized and has always on encryption, but is so incredibly simple and easy to onboard and use, and doesn’t require a phone number or even an email. It also works on all platforms with a single app.

    • WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      5·
      2 days ago

      and doesn’t require a phone number or even an email

      wait, doesn’t it rely on the email system?

      I would rather have signal possibly collect my social graph than google through gmail.

      • ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.netEnglish
        4·
        2 days ago

        It uses a subset of the email protocol (which makes it very difficult for governments to block) but it no longer uses an an actual email address to function by default.

        Even if someone did use a gmail exclusively for this (you can’t use it with an email account you use for normal emails too), everything would be entirely encrypted, and only the app itself would be able to decrypt it (google would not be able to decrypt the messages). But again, no normal user is going to use an actual email address.

        You can read more about how it works in their FAQ. But the short version is once you pick a username, it just gives you a QR code or link to send to people, which connects you immediately in an encrypted chat room with no faffing around with emails.