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Comment by outime | Hacker News Reader

Compared to WhatsApp, they do have access to all messages from every person (except for the few people using secret chats) and group so I'd not be very surprised if they started to mine that data somehow if they really want the money.

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Compared to WhatsApp that is owned by a massive megacorp that bought it for over $10bn and that has already tried to start mining metadata from it I would say Telegram still has its advantages.

(FWIW: I prefer Signal.)

What is the advantage when Telegram has less money and more data?

Same advantage as buying a car from someone you don't know versus buying from a known fraudster and bully?

Yes: in Telegrams case I might possibly, maybe at some time be taken advantage of.

In WhatsApps case it would surprise everyone greatly if one isn't - sooner or later - take advantage of.

Prefer Signal myself too. It's a bit hard to switch over from WhatsApp and tried to use it at least with my spouse. One feature that Telegram and WhatsApp miss, is being able to send yourself a message. On Signal you can do this and it's very convenient for taking notes, sending passwords (laptop <--> phone) and for saving bookmarks. I used to share interesting bookmarks from HN to my email, but that quickly got cumbersome to sort out.

Telegram has the saved messages chat which is a chat with yourself.

Agreed. This actually works incredibly well on Telegram to sync snippets and files between devices.

FWIW you can also create multiple groups with the same person(s) so you can keep one "group" chat with your spouse for chores, shopping lists etc and another for photos of the kids, birthday planning, funny stuff etc.

This probably works in most messengers though, but it is a nice hack anyway.

OT but if it helps you, Whatsapp does actually allow you to send messages to yourself (sort of)! You can create a Whatsapp group with you and one other person in it, and then remove them from the group. The result is a group with only you in it that you can use to send messages to yourself.

You can do it on Telegram chatting with the "Saved messages" pseudo-user.

Signal has the Note-to-self feature that's E2EE. Telegram's chat to self is not end-to-end encrypted.

How does attacking Facebook dismiss the fact that Telegram has your raw conversations and can monetize them?

It is only "attacking Facebook" as much as it is also just "stating again what is already publicly known about Facebook".

This was all in the news: Facebook lying about not being able to connect WhatsApp and Facebook, then trying to weasel their way out of their previous statements.

For all the problems Telegram has they don't seen to have our raw messages more than GMail has your raw emails.

Yep: unlike WhatsApp and Signal they can, technically produce them. (Edit: I forgot to mention: WhatsApp chat logs gets uploaded unencrypted to American Cloud providers. I have less against the police and Americans than many other here but lets not pretend end-to-end encryption helps for anything when you backup the data unencrypted with everyones favourite villain it seems: NSA)

And yes: like with GMail if Telegram has done exactly what they said and done it properly it would probably take cooperation of at least two sysadmins on different teams and it woumd also probably trigger alarms east and west.

At least that is my understanding.

Which would make me not want to use it if I was a revolutionary in a totalitarian state that could get access to that data.

Telegram having access doesn't necessarily mean the totalitarian state gets access, though I see your point

What about totalitarian state with 1,000,000 USD of extra cash to spend to buy a zero-day, that then exploits the server and reads any message from there?

That would be a great reason to stop using it. If they never plan to use that data then they're idiots for designing a system that makes them liable for all that user data they accumulate in case it leaks. And if there's one constant on the modern planet that is "everyone will get hacked at some point". So that's another good reason to stop using Telegram. Like right now.

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