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>it's entirely possible that Telegram sends everything to some government entity somewhere even for private chats

No, private chats use end-to-end encryption, and unlike WhatsApp the Telegram client is open source so this can actually be verified.

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Unless I spend time to look into who verified it and decide if I trust them - this doesn't mean much - for eg. the article above claims their crypto is criticised - since it's their own implementation it could be intentionally weakened for all I know, even with a review it's possible to sneak by a backdoor vulnerability - security projects with a lot more users had major flaws discovered well into the project lifetime (eg. OpenSSL heartbleed).

Telegram private chats are not end-to-end encrypted. They are opt-in, in the name of "secret chats". If that's not done, chats are stored on their cloud in plain view. While Signal can offer synced end-to-end encrypted messaging, I wonder why Telegram cannot. Probably comes with a few tradeoffs like slowness and loss of features?

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