Permanently Deleted
Everyone was told, from the outset , not to trust telegram. Amnesty International, the EFF, the cryptography community all said this as long as 10 years ago.
It’s actually pathetic to read a Russian talking about how it was “built for activists and not criminals “ . What a worm.
I don't think Russians actually thought that. Its just that if they publicly pointed out the issues with Telegram and publicly suggested better alternatives, bad things would happen to them.
Doesn’t signal allow signups without a phone now?
Also second SimpleX that the other person mentioned.
No, it gives usernames in addition to phone numbers. They refuse to remove the phone number requirement. How else could they help the feds identify your account?
Never trust a third party to keep your shit private. Especially if privacy is their main selling point.
If you can read and understand the code, sure. Otherwise you’re still just extending trust to someone perhaps less reputable than even the corporations who are dying to sell you out. For example, the back door some mysterious contributor slipped into xz recently.
My recommendation is to live life as if privacy on the internet did not exist, because it doesn’t.
There is such a thing as credibility. You can extend trust to others that have credibility. For example, security audits from companies that are credible. Or, you use an app because a trustworthy techie friend of yours says they're safe.
But a prerequisite in all these cases is going to be FOSS code and client side encrypt.
Telegram had credibility. It was being used by journalists to protect sources.
You can extend trust to individuals but do not apply that to companies or organizations if you care at all about what they’re doing with what you give them. Not everyone has some mythical tech privacy wizard on call to give them perfect advice every time they open an account on an app or website.
Even client side encryption is not infallible. The algorithm you use will eventually be crackable and probably sooner than you think. Nothing lasts forever.
The most foolproof way to ensure something remains private is to not put it on the internet at all.
Fortunately we have folks like Freedom of the Press Foundation, who provide trainings to journalists
This is really simple. Use Signal or WIRE. Proton or maybe Tutanota for email.
Avoid garbage like Telegram and FB Messenger. Discord as well.
There seems to be a gross misunderstanding of how everything works here. Any platform will need to provide data to authorities when "asked properly" - as in, receives an actual order from some enforcing body that has authority on the subject in question. No commercial company will fight the CIA in court to protect your data. The best you can hope for is that they minimize what kind of data they collect about you in the first place - in the case of E2EE, they will only have access to IPs and other metadata such as connection timestamps and nothing else. But all of the services you listed will collect at least IPs and most will do phone numbers as well. The only difference with Telegram is that they're transparent about it. You can either avoid using commercial platforms altogether, or use them in a way such that data retrieved from them will be useless. But believing that "Signal will never give my IP to law enforcement" is delusional.
Proton had a recent subpeona they had to honor. All the data they had was yes, the dude has an email here. But no content. Granted, if you’re exchanging with a gmail account, it’s moot, for those exchanges anyway.
Nah, it senda tons of unencrypted data, and you literally can't turn it off
I see a lot of people mention WIRE recently. Did everyone collectively forget how they sold out in 2019 and removed their canary (aka. compromised)?
In July 2019 Wire raised $8.2m investment from Morpheus Ventures and others. On July 18 of the same month, 100% of the company's shares have been taken over by Wire Holdings Inc., Delaware, USA.
Does those apps have unlimited storage? Channel with unlimited subscribers? Or much more
This is a wild admission. Not only does it show that Telegram completely betrayed all of their users, but it also reveals that they know about all the terrorism and child porn channels on their service, and deliberately didn't delete them.
I assume every single chat app is either a honey pot or is more than willing to hand over all logs to law enforcement. Anything advertising E2EE is basically saying "hey all you pedophiles and money launderers, have I got a data tracking app for you!"
