First choice is always talk on SimpleX, second is Signal/Molly for something easier, there is no other app that I use.
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Signal seems like an obvious choice over Telegram if privacy is the exclusive priority.
I do love Telegram tho for the ability to send full-quality photos/videos, log-on with 2+ phones simultaneously, visual customization, etc
Personally, Signal. But I don’t have much reason to back it up other than Telegram being Russian.
Telegram is not Russian. The founder is a Russian - who left Russia about a decade ago after being pushed out of his local Facebook clone (VK) due to not complying with government requests. They nowadays mostly seem to be in Dubai, but as a legal entity hard to locate due to a cat and mouse game they’re playing to avoid being reachable for authorities worldwide who want to enforce local laws.
But their main office in st Petersburg (russia) lol
not that it matters (see my other comment in this thread), but, citation needed? wikipedia says it is maybe in Dubai.
It’s tragicomic how some people trust Telegram specifically because they perceive CEO Pavel Durov to be an enemy of the Russian government, while others trust Telegram because they think it is actually a Russian company and thus won’t share data with western governments. (Durov talking about the facts that Signal has received millions from the US government’s Radio Free Asia and sends all messages through Amazon servers helps with this second perception).
I assume Durov’s relationship status with various governments is it’s complicated but also cordial. IMO it would be prudent to assume that intelligence and law enforcement agencies from lots of countries, including ones that are adversaries of each other, are all getting lots of data from Telegram both with and without the company’s cooperation.
There is literally no e2ee for most messages, and new devices can be added and authenticated by SMS, so, even the weakest of adversaries can play with it. Telegram really democratizes surveillance capabilities.
Fair enough, thanks for the info
I would never trust telegram. The company behind it is mostly Russian scammers. I would use the opensource alternative to signal called Molly
Telegram
I ”trust” Signal the most because there is 100% transparency, I can look into the inner workings of the app and see what it does at all time.
Telegram is the best (in sense of privacy) message app you can actually manage to get your friends and family to use.
In my case, the hardest app to convince my friends and family to use is Telegram.
There’s definitely the stigma that Telegram is only used by criminals
Wait what? I thought Telegram pretty much was Discord but for people who prefer phones over computers.
Wasn’t there also a controversy where some people believed that telegram was private and secure, but that only was for a very limited subset of their features?
Disclaimer: I’ve only ever installed telegram once for one single person, but promptly removed it afterward for sending out messages to some of my contacts on its own, so I have no clue how it actually works. Feel free to correct or educate me.
Wasn’t there also a controversy where some people believed that telegram was private and secure, but that only was for a very limited subset of their features?
i think you’re thinking of how you have to go out of your way to start a “secret chat” for it to have the touted encryption. those “secret chats” are way less feature-rich than the standard ones though, which sucks ass
I thought Telegram pretty much was Discord but for people who prefer phones over computers.
Not a bad way to look at it, although I think one-on-one messaging is much more common on Telegram compared to discord, which has its “communities” thing as its main use case.
Automatically sending messages to your contacts?? Someone might have access to your account
It was a message along the lines of “Your friend Ekky has started using Telegram, say hello to them”.
Not sure if it was a notification or a message, but that was very uncanny and definitely felt scammy and abusive. It’s not the first time I’ve seen an app behave this way, though usually the app asks first.
Oh yeah it notifies people who already have your number
Here, telegram is effectively used only for piracy.
piracysharing
Signal if I had to choose but there are plenty of other options
Uhh like what?
Session, Simplex chat and a bunch of other less functional ones
Matrix
One of those had an entire Ph.D thesis written on the topic of compromising the encryption used. The other did not. I use the latter.
Which one is which? I’m out of the loop :(
Telegram’s the one that was broken as someone’s Ph.D thesis. Signal wasn’t.
Ahh, I guessed this was the case. I just couldn’t find anything about it. Thank you :)
Threema
Like telegram, threema insists on making up their own 🤡-crypto constructions which (unsurprisingly) are not very good: https://breakingthe3ma.app/ (see also The Register’s summary, and/or here for some earlier research).
Their response to those findings was to reinvent and replace everything (again). It seems like a pretty safe bet that their new amateur cryptographic constructions will get broken too, just as soon as the next bored researcher gets around to looking closely at it.
Right the formally proven threema crypto is going to get broken tomorrow /s https://threema.ch/en/blog/posts/security-proof-ibex
i wish we had a remindme bot so i could remember to come back to this comment in a year or so 🙄
me and my zero friends who use it
well… no need to have a messanger if you haven’t any friends.
Nah bro they just all cheap asf
Buy it for them
For people I don’t know or just started talking, I give them my telegram username that’s not linked to my personal phone number. For friends and family, I use signal.
Lots of opensource projects have telegram channels for updates. Not to mention news and local updates as well.
People need to incorporate a social aspect of the real world. Everyone isn’t as privacy conscious as you are and you can have multiple apps for different scenarios.
If you don’t ever want to meet anyone new, signal is perfect.
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I trust Signal more, but the main reason I use Signal is because a lot of people I know use it. I would personally love if Briar caught on more, but given that isn’t really happening SimpleX is your best bet.
Oh, and hopefully Veilid will catch on big
- Session
- XMPP with OMEMO
- a Tox, if possible (no real asynch common)
- Matrix
- Signal
Default Signal is better although Telegram has Secret Chat. I love thar Telegram let’s you use a username to connect to others without exposing your mobile number to contacts.
But I have way more friends who actually use Telegram than Signal. No idea why although for many the massive community groups are used by a lot communities for staying in touch, as well as safety/security groups in communities.
Using signal but planning to switch. SimpleX and XMPP are my candidates.
