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Comment by roymurdock | Hacker News Reader

This is exactly what the judge wants. He is trying to get Whatsapp to comply with his request. What could be a better way to do this then to drive millions of users to a competitor? The longer Whatsapp holds out, the more users leave the service, possibly for good.

Thing is, this better be a really important case. Because if users migrate and stay on Telegram, it could be much harder for Brazilian courts to get records in the future.

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> Because if users migrate and stay on Telegram, it could be much harder for Brazilian courts to get records in the future.

Yeah, that's the way that I see it. I don't believe this is the right kind of gambit to be playing. Not only would I expect Telegram to be even more likely than Facebook to tell the judge to shove the subpoena up his arse, he has escalated a war with a company that often is very good at fighting all of its battles on its own terms.

I am now very curious who the subpoena was going after.

> Thing is, this better be a really important case. Because if users migrate and stay on Telegram, it could be much harder for Brazilian courts to get records in the future.

Why would it be harder? Telegram has the entire plaintext message history for every message all of their users have ever sent, WhatsApp doesn't. It's much easier for Telegram to comply, not harder.

I'm not completely familiar with data storage and access policies between the two, but I was under the impression that Telegram's main selling point was security/privacy and that you could schedule messages to be permanently deleted from Telegram's servers. Now that I've read more on the subject from you and others, it seems to be UX/UI and marketing.

I'll defer to you on this one as you're an expert in the field.

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