alt Hacker NewsWhat is encrypted and how is public information. If it doesn't fit your use case don't use it. There is no "spin".
People were spreading this kind of FUD until last week when all of a sudden people started claiming it was self evident that "of course Meta can read your WhatsApp messages". I don't get this kind of weird fixation with a product. I suspect it's two things. Perceived Russian origin and that one guy dared write a crypto library rather than using their own. I agree with the latter. The prior is not even true the way people understand it to be. I for one like the stickers. Shoot me :)
We even give companies like Google which we know for a fact is looking at all of our data a free pass with the super western "privacy policy" cop out while judging other tools with a different set of rules.
Another darling is Signal who refused to stop collecting phone numbers until recently even though they never needed it, does not allow open source or other clients to use their servers (and won't release the actual server code) and frankly does not work half as well as Telegram in terms of UX.
All of this is really confusing for me.
Replies
> What is encrypted and how is public information. If it doesn't fit your use case don't use it. There is no "spin".
Correct way of speaking about Telegram is - nothing* is encrypted. (encrypted chats are not more than 0.5% of all chats). That would be a "no spin" take.
> one guy dared write a crypto library rather than using their own
Red herring. This library is NOT used for more than 99.95% of chats on Telegram. It is applied only to "secret chat", which is a torture device with horrible UX. I guess that horrible UX is the result of choice of using custom crypto library instead of going with something capable of working when addressee is not online.
> Another darling is Signal who refused to stop collecting phone numbers until recently even though they never needed it, does not allow open source or other clients to use their servers (and won't release the actual server code) and frankly does not work half as well as Telegram in terms of UX.
Phone numbers are still used as anti-spam measure. You are free to get a burner, register an account and throw away the SIM card.
> does not allow open source
Signal client is open source.
> frankly does not work half as well as Telegram in terms of UX.
It works well where it does matter. Vide Telegram's "secret chats".
> All of this is really confusing for me.
You are clearly misinformed. That explains the confusion.
> All of this is really confusing for me.
Yep, I can see that.
The problem with Telegram is that it is not an E2EE messaging platform, period. It is a non-E2EE platform that has an option to encrypt 1:1 messages with a criticised algorithm. Whoever uses Telegram does it for all the nice features that are not E2EE.
> all of a sudden people started claiming it was self evident that "of course Meta can read your WhatsApp messages".
Because some people say stuff like this doesn't make it right. WhatsApp messages are E2EE encrypted, unlike Telegram. There are other things to criticise with WhatsApp, but not that.
> Signal who refused to stop collecting phone numbers until recently even though they never needed it
As you said, you're confused. Signal needed the phone numbers for convenience, so that you could reach your friends. Exactly the same reason as WhatsApp. Could they have done without it? Yes, but maybe Signal would not be as popular. That's a valid tradeoff, and Signal never lied about it. Also having to share your phone number with Signal is still better than any of the other popular platforms. Anything that is "more private" than Signal hasn't managed to get on the map.