Flee from Meta

Posted Jan 29, 2025 10:57 UTC (Wed) by chris_se (subscriber, #99706)
In reply to: Flee from Meta by LtWorf
Parent article: Linux-related discussion as a cybersecurity threat

> I use telegram with my family.

Just a side note: from a data privacy perspective, most other apps available nowadays are better than Telegram. Telegram is **not** end-to-end encrypted by default. You can activate that in specific circumstances, but you have to do so for each individual conversation, and it's quite complicated.

Now in your specific use case, that might not be an issue, and you might be willing to sacrifice that for other features the app has, so please don't read my reply as a criticism.

But I wanted to make this clear, because Telegram is advertised as a secure messenger, when it is in fact by far the least secure of the mainstream messaging apps (if you ignore regular unencrypted SMS). If you care about data privacy and security, moving from WhatsApp to Telegram is actually a step down, not up.

Flee from Meta

Posted Jan 29, 2025 15:57 UTC (Wed) by LtWorf (subscriber, #124958) [Link] (3 responses)

Telegram is easily available on computers. I know it's not e2ee, same goes for emails and every single proprietary application (even if they claim they are… unless they're open source it's just meaningless words).

I'm fully aware of it.

> moving from WhatsApp to Telegram is actually a step down, not up.

Very debatable. One has a closed source client and one has an open source client. One claims to be e2ee (but nobody knows), while one lets you see the code and make sure yourself.

Flee from Meta

Posted Jan 29, 2025 18:21 UTC (Wed) by hkario (subscriber, #94864) [Link] (2 responses)

Signal is available on computers too

Flee from Meta

Posted Jan 29, 2025 22:34 UTC (Wed) by LtWorf (subscriber, #124958) [Link] (1 responses)

It is available, but not "apt instal" available, having it on the pinephone or such devices is a major complication, while telegram just works.

Also the fact that very institutional USA players promote signal heavily makes me suspect it's not as safe as advertised. But that's just my paranoia. Not that telegram is safe at all.

Flee from Meta

Posted Jan 30, 2025 10:17 UTC (Thu) by tajyrink (subscriber, #2750) [Link]

Yes, ironically Telegram _clients_ are more open and free software than Signal is. You can write your own Telegram client (and many have, thus you have native clients on different mobile Linux OSs) while Signal actively disallows third party clients. And you can install Telegram fork from F-Droid, etc.

Sure, Signal is e2e, but if exaggerating it's e2e in a bit similar sense than Whatsapp is. It has a long history of including proprietary binary blobs and being only available in proprietary stores (I mean places from where you also get automatic updates). Even though on the other hand there is work on reproducible builds, their actions drive people to actively install it from places like Google Play instead of something that community could more easily verify.

I do prefer Signal at the moment for its functionality and theoretically well proven security, but I've started to use Matrix more as well.