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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Is any of this end-to-end encrypted?

Likely not, else they'd have confirmed it in their announcement and/or updated their E2E 1-to-1 video call documentation. The Verge asked and never got a response: https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/28/22407752/telegram-group-v...

Documentation I mentioned: https://core.telegram.org/api/end-to-end/video-calls

And ephemeral, when desired by the user.

This is kind of loaded. I do think Telegram does an excellent job at ephemerality from a practical standpoint. Without being able to audit their server though, we have no clue if 'disappeared' chats and messages are actually scrubbed from their server.

I was once banned from the service for playing around with very old clients and had a back and forth with them over email for a week or so (it was re-enabled and they apologized for the inconvenience). They are prickly and refuse to give any details over how data is managed.

Interested to read a blog post about that story if you decide to write about it. Woz tought us never to trust a computer. Trusting software seems equally risky. Approaching comms from this perspective leads one to assume the best place to hide, so to speak, is in the open—in plain sight.

>Telegram does an excellent job at ephemerality from a practical standpoint. Without being able to audit their server though, we have no clue if 'disappeared' chats and messages are actually scrubbed from their server.

Aren't disappearing messages a feature of secret chats? If my understanding is correct here, these messages are not backed up to the cloud. Rather they are stored within your device. That's precisely why e2ee synced chats are not available.

I wasn't referencing E2EE, I was specifically talking about their regular 'cloud' chats. I am speaking of features like deleting old messages from prior chats or even going as far as removing your account. These are not possible to do on many other more secure chat systems, I cannot tell you how many new Matrix users are frustrated that this is not possible there but it's simply not in a federated system, cannot force other servers to scrub your server's messages. It is practical to have this ability to tear down comms and scrub a shareh/synched history but it is nor perfect.

You are correct about their secret chats. The secret chats limitations (inability to sync) actually encourage destroying and recreating sessions when needed vs Signal that is intended for longer synched sessions. Not having to worry about those sessions syncing to a system you may not be in front of is also a benefit.

> Without being able to audit their server though, we have no clue if 'disappeared' chats and messages are actually scrubbed from their server.

Automatically disappearing messages are only available in "secret" chats and those are end-to-end encrypted.

There is possibility to set self-destruct timer for photos you send.

You are right. I forgot that. I guess that is not end-to-end encrypted in regular chats.

_And_ ephemeral? Does that mean this is end-to-end encrypted?

The ephemeral functionality is different from end-to-end encrypted functionality. The former is part of the end-to-end encrypted chats, and can be modified as needed. It's basically a timer that controls when your messages disappear.

So, it's _not_ end-to-end encrypted?

The secret chat- one-to-one has ephemeral option. You can set up auto delete in groups now.

"Secret" groups are in the works, I believe

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