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Comment by amatecha | Hacker News Reader

"Russia banned Telegram on its territory in April because we refused to provide decryption keys for all our users’ communications to Russia’s security agencies"

Why does Telegram have decryption keys for all their users' communications (or do they)?

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For private chats Telegram uses end-to-end encryption and they cannot read the chats. Of course, they control the clients though, so they could update their clients to also send the chats to Russian intelligence and it would be hard for anyone to notice.

Yeah, I thought it's supposed to be e2e-encrypted, so I was confused by this statement. I guess it make sense if he means they refused to add a backdoor like you say.

Telegram isn't E2E encrypted by default.

You need to choose an "encrypted" chat.

They have been criticised over this for many years now.

Yes I would think intelligence agencies should prefer Telegram over other encrypted chat providers since there's at least this possibility of leaking.

Maybe this will have the unintended consequence of moving users to a more secure and censorship-resistant alternative.

Also desktop telegram client doesn't have e2e, only mobile one.

The macOS client supports end-to-end encryption.

Which is why I can't use it because most of my messages are sent from desktop.

The communication between client and server is encrypted and probably authorities would like to get the keys for it. By default Telegram doesn't use end-to-end encryption, and the messages are received in cleartext on the server.

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