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Comment by eitland | Hacker News Reader

This post is about the UX, not about the crypto:

Meanwhile on Telegram everything just works more or less as is has always done.

If I click on settings I get a "menu" called "Passcode & Face ID". There's a button saying "Turn Passcode On", and a help text saying: "Note: if you forget the passcode, you'll need to delete and reinstall the app. All secret chats will be lost."

While I personally have big questions around the encryption in Telegram I think Telegram takes a much more effective approach towards making it available: by default it is just a very good messaging application that is a good replacement for Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp and almost everything else except Signal.

On top of that it provides secret chats which are end to end encrypted (and can also be set to automatically disappear), and an option for deleting all my data if I don't log in within 1, 3, 6 or 12 months.

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Except that I don't trust Telegram because they seem to ship a marketing-first, cryptography-later sort of product. IIRC initially their "E2E encryption" could be decrypted on the server. In contrast, Signal seems to put strong encryption first.

There is no E2E encryption in Telegram for any reasonable definition of the term.

This is plain wrong. I think even tptacek has become more careful about his wording now.

There's a lot of problems around Telegram from their marketing to their crypto implementation to their incentives.

But please stick to the facts.

Facts are that whatever e2e encryption telegram allegedly offers needs to be invoked per-conversation as a 'secret chat' and is not availabe on dekstops, normal conversations are ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ -encrypted

Telegram is not a secure messenger, it offers the same level of non-security as skype or fb messenger - not even that of watsapp.

It has different problems than skype, fb messenger and WhatsApp.

For starters it doesn't give my raw metadata including who I talk to, when and so on to Zuckerberg, or unencrypted chat logs of both sides of a chat to servers in USA.

Do you have higher trust towards the Durov brothers and their UK/UAE company ? Because it does all that with them.

So far - unless I've missed something big - there's nothing to suggest they aren't trying to stick to their plan to keep keys and encrypted data on different servers in different jurisdictions..?

And the Durov brothers weren't running a massive ad and tracking network last I checked.

Don't you wonder how they make or plan to make revenue or do you think they're in it for truth, justice and happiness of all mankind ?

Yes, I do. I even mentioned it in another reply to you:

> There's a lot of problems around Telegram from their marketing to their crypto implementation to their incentives.

That said there are multiple ways around the monetization problem as long as you aren't trying to become a Silicon Valley unicorn:

- 1 USD pr user like WhatsApp

- Paid stickers and storage like MeWe

- Extra storage and extra features like Evernote

- Paid API access

- etc

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