It has severe drawbacks if you use e2e. The default is without because that's what most people want.
I would suspect majority of users would disagree with the question "are you ok with Telegram keeping a plaintext copy of your messages"
The most technical answer you can expect is "All Telegram chats use MTProto encryption. Their End-to-end encryption protocol is called MTProto. Ergo, they can't see my messages".
Ask any user if they want privacy or no privacy. 0% will tell you, oh I explicitly want no privacy.
>The most technical answer you can expect is "All Telegram chats use MTProto encryption. Their End-to-end encryption protocol is called MTProto. Ergo, they can't see my messages".
Sorry but that just stupid. Any user who cares can clearly read which chats are e2e encrypted and which are not. Zero technical knowledge is needed. The name of the protocol or other irrelevant info are also not needed. The reality is people often just dont care.
>Ask any user if they want privacy or no privacy. 0% will tell you, oh I explicitly want no privacy.
Again at the verge of pure stupidity. Idek what your argument is here. No one forces you or anyone to use Telegram nor is the question privacy versus no privacy. Its mostly privacy versus convenience and more likely its use-cases versus nothing. Because other solutions dont have public channels and public groups and other telegram features people want. And "privacy" is meaningless for stuff mean to be public. Anonymity would be the next best thing and Telegram gives that although they ofc know who posts on a channel since there is no feasible way to change that. They have to know who's responsible for publicly posted content.
If you dont want or need any of that dont use it, its that simple.
It's absolutely not hard. Literally my point :D I want choice but there is no choice. I can't enable secret chats on desktop clients. I can't enable secret chats for groups. The choice is choosing between another app entirely, not from within options in Telegram.
>Its up to you beside the fact that its also completely voluntary to even use telegram.
That's like saying, "if you don't like the society, don't criticize it, join the Amish". I have every right to criticize Telegram, if you think they're immune to critic, understand that's a dangerous situation. It's really weird me being concerned about your (and others') safety, is a threat to your self-esteem. If Telegram is part of your personal identity, you're in a world of trouble.
>Any user who cares can clearly read which chats are e2e encrypted and which are not.
No, 90% of people don't understand what encryption is. 99.9% of people don't understand the distinction between E2EE and cloud encryption. Your views are distorted by your bubble. Also nice work with the weasel word "who cares". So let me say this: if you care about privacy, you read my comments with the mindset "this guy is trying to help me", not "this guy is trying to attack my self-esteem".
"Its mostly privacy versus convenience"
It absolutely boils down to that when we start to compare applications. I'm not denying that. But when we say there's two ways to achieve same level of convenience, one is easy and insecure, the other is hard but secure. The problem isn't e.g. "You can't do end-to-end encrypted group chats", the problem actually "it's hard to do end-to-end encrypted group chats". We know, because apps like Telegram have failed to do that.
So it's not "use-case vs nothing", it's not "insecure group chat or nothing". It's "Telegram lacks know-how on how to create secure group chats vs Signal knows how to make secure group chats". Surely you must see this.
"Because other solutions dont have public channels and public groups and other telegram features people want."
But now you're lying. Signal's group can be public, because the group link can be made public. If you want to make the argument that Signal groups are not searchable inside the app, or if you want to make the argument Signal don't scale to massive group sizes, the by all means do so. Please understand I'm not advocating E2EE for massive, +1000 member gropus, I never have. The point is, small groups for small groups have the right to privacy too, and there is no technical reason non-super-groups can't have E2EE, and upgrading to supergroups would drop the E2EE.
"they ofc know who posts on a channel since there is no feasible way to change that."
Funnily enough, Telegram could make all clients connect via Tor by default, not require phone numbers, and thus, make everyone anonymous. But I can totally see why it's not feasible. E.g. the E2EE calls in telegram would stop being low latency. Adding six relay nodes between users would make it unusable. So you see, I'm not blind to real life technical limitations. But I'm not afraid to point out bad design decision when there is no actual technical limitation, either.
The fact is, Telegram doesn't know how to make E2EE sync across devices. The current design allows two people who own iPhone and iMac to have secret chats. But this is what it looks like: One secret chat between the phone and the phone, another between desktop and phone, and third between desktop and desktop, and a fourth one between phone and desktop. So four chats in total. And you can never know if the contact has read the message.
Compare that to Signal that has one chat per contact, seamlessly synced on all devices. The convenience is right there, embedded in the clever key management system.
"And "privacy" is meaningless for stuff mean to be public"
I ABSOLUTELY agree with you. But surely you have your own friends, and you form groups with them. The stuff you say to each other is not public. And if you disagree with that assessment, surely, you don't think every other group of close friends, family etc. have nothing to hide from the rest of the world?
I say, let the public channels be public, I'm not trying to rob you of the enjoyment like millions of crypto currency spam chanels. That stuff doesn't benefit from E2EE. But I say, give us the choice to E2EE small groups, and 1:1 chats regardless of platform.
Why are you opposed to users having technically guaranteed privacy in these contexts?
"If you dont want or need any of that dont use it, its that simple."
The problem in modern society is, we often don't really have such choice. I can't go tell hundreds of contacts, let alone hundreds of millions of people explicitly everything I know. The ones I've told have been absolutely horrified to learn Telegram is not nearly as private as they've previously thought. And everyone has thought Telegram is right there, next to Signal. So kudos to Telegram marketing team. If only the engineers were able to actually deliver privacy tech that matches the public's perception.
Thats exactly what you should do. Telegram is not the tool/service that does what you want. It just as much not what you want like Skype isn't what you want and MS Paint is probably also not what you want. Any and all criticism is pointless there is nothing wrong with these tools they just dont do what you wish them to. Leave them to the people who actually want the features that Telegram/Skype/Paint or any other tool provides.
In any case, for a messenger that advertises as secure, placing security after convenience seems pretty unusual.
Also let's not forget what a bad user experience Whatsapp offers apart from that. No bots, no channels, no hiding your phone number, no polls, limited permission system in groups,... i could continue for 20 minutes. But what is most infuriating to me is the backup system. It never works and you can only store it in iCloud/Google Drive.
Many Telegram users use them for chats with large groups of people (hundreds or thousands) with native bot support being a huge thing.
Whatsapp and Signal don't give many tools for handling groups that big, with Telegram you can actually manage it.
If you only use Telegram for convenience and not security, then I guess my point upstream stands.
>for a messenger that advertises as secure
Its p much PR nonsense but to be fair it also come from the early days when telegram was the only IM with any e2e that had a relevant market share. I think its understandable that they will not remove "secure" from the description after all those years, it would raise some eyebrows if they would suddenly no longer say is secure ryt?
>e2ee in general does not have to have those drawbacks.
How come no other messenger simply copies telegrams feature but with e2e? Also what exactly is the point of e2e chats if every user that joins gets a key to decrypt the whole chat. Its completely useless "security".
Oh don't be so vague, go on and name one!
> How come no other messenger simply copies telegrams feature but with e2e?
I've been wondering the same thing, especially for something as young as Matrix that didn't (at the time Telegram was already good) have a decent client themselves yet.
I've also been thinking myself of doing exactly that, but then it's basically a full-time job to get something halfway decent. People worked on reverse engineering a server at all, not an encrypted server but just any working self-hostable server at all. I don't remember the repository name but it's on GitHub. Even this was abandoned because it's just a ton of work that very few people are going to use. Additionally modifying the clients to work with a different protocol is even more work.
So I can see why people aren't doing this because I'm one of them, but yeah what I don't get is why the folks at Signal/Matrix/Threema/etc. would rather start from scratch than do this.
It might be easier to have some sort of plugin that overlays encryption on top of Telegram and uses the existing servers. On F-Droid there's this project called OverSec <https://f-droid.org/en/packages/io.oversec.one/> that I've been meaning to try, though presumably it hooks on an input field level and so it couldn't decrypt images before decrypting so it's not a full solution. You'd need to really modify the client (every one of them) and everyone needs to use your custom clients.
See my reply above.
>I've been wondering the same thing...
Its not possible (or feasible) to implement the key telegram features in Matrix or other always-e2ee protocols.
>It might be easier to have some sort of plugin that overlays encryption on top of Telegram [...] and everyone needs to use your custom clients.
Its against the telegram api ToS. You are not allowed to implement features that require other parties to download your client. You can only add local features that do not affect other user who use the official client.
>See my reply above.
Yeah I saw that. You wrote:
> Not even gonna read it all Have a nice day and keep using whatever you want
so I don't see why I should bother trying to answer your question as well.
I tried to explain it but people like you dont want to know. You just want to argue over e2ee nonsense that no one cares about who uses telegram for public conversations. You could ask HN to make comments e2ee its about that "useful" for what I use telegram for. I want my messages to be read, its that simple.
Which feature?
>clearly explained in their FAQ why they made it.
They absolutely did not.
>How come no other messenger simply copies telegrams feature but with e2e?
Which feature isn't being copied? Signal just implemented effin stickers with end-to-end encryption.
>Also what exactly is the point of e2e chats if every user that joins gets a key to decrypt the whole chat.
Firstly, new users in e.g. Signal groups don't get access to group message history. Secondly, overwhelming majority of Signal groups are not public. Your claim that E2EE in groups is useless assumes anyone can join any group. That's not the case, therefore your argument is completely baseless and thoughtless.
Almost all. Either not possible or not useful. Telegram has huge public community. People need to be able to join/leave and forward stuff to other places etc. etc. It just makes no sense to add any e2ee to that. Even in normal groups the default is that any user can add someone so the new user would need to get the decryption key on invite. Then you have bots that need to be able to read messages so they need the key too. Then you have cloud search so telegram itself need the key as well. Its just completely nonsensical at that point even if it somehow would be possible to implement it.
>They absolutely did not.
https://telegram.org/faq#q-why-not-just-make-all-chats-39sec... I have no trouble understanding it. You may not like it but its clear and easy to understand.
>Which feature isn't being copied?
All the ones that are not possible with e2ee.
>Signal just implemented effin stickers with end-to-end encryption.
Yes, and its an anti-feature for most people. People dont care if a sticker is e2e encrypted send to a chat. But what user care about is how fast it is, how much data it uses and how much it drains the battery. Telegram easily wins all of this because it does not e2e encrypt stickers, instead they are stored in the telegram cloud and the message only contains a file_id for the other user to load the sticker (once, then it is cached locally)
>Firstly, new users in e.g. Signal groups don't get access to group message history.
More anti-features, normal user want a new user in chat to be able to read the history. (If not telegram allows it to be disabled)
>overwhelming majority of Signal groups are not public.
How is that relevant. Use cases are different. I use telegram almost exclusively for public stuff or semi-public stuff. Maybe this is the problem here. You dont use telegram and dont know that it is way more than a messenger. Its more like a social media platform.
"I dont want or use any of that (you, probably?)" Fine, stick with what you use but dont tell me everything telegram does could/should be done with e2ee. Its absurd and nonsensical. It would be like making twitter completely e2ee rather than just give the user and secure e2ee DM option. Which is what telegram did. You have the option for e2ee one-on-one chats if you actually need it. Ive used it a few time like to send someone a password or a private document. But for the most part I have no use for it.
Signal has group invite links.
>Then you have bots that need to be able to read messages so they need the key too.
Signal has bots.
>Then you have cloud search
What you have is search, and Signal has search too, for the local message log. Telegram's log search lacks partial and wildcard searches. It's extremely inferior. Also, Telegram's cloud search gets extremely slow if you try to find anything older than few months.
>You may not like it but its clear and easy to understand.
It doesn't explain why they can't implement E2EE for normal group chats from technical PoV. Neither does Durov's blog post.
> But what user care about is how fast it is
What's the difference? Give me numbers
>how much data it uses
What's the difference?
>how much it drains the battery
What's the difference?
How about some nice facts and sources?
I think it's cute you try to label every secure feature an anti-feature, without understanding security is the fundamental attribute of every feature. You wouldn't use a feature that leaked the content to your worst enemy, why would you upload it to server that when hacked, allows your worst enemy to read it?
>I use telegram almost exclusively for public stuff or semi-public stuff.
Sure, if you personally have nothing to hide, you're welcome to use Palringo (that AFAIK still pushes everything over HTTP) for all I care. Just don't enforce your privileged threat model to anyone else.
>Its absurd and nonsensical
You're in a conversation about security of Telegram. If you don't give a shit about security, go, enjoy your life. Why did you bother come here to brag about your privileged life that doesn't have to be concerned with security?
> It would be like making twitter completely e2ee
That's bullshit. Twitter doesn't e.g. have groups that would enjoy expectation of privacy. Twitter is also not a messaging app, it's a social media, moreover, it's a micro-blogging site. It's content is intended to be public. Sure, the direct messages should probably use opportunistic E2EE, but its not exactly advocating itself as "heavily encrypted", it doesn't IMO have to be.
>You have the option for e2ee one-on-one chats if you actually need it.
No I want E2EE for my group of 10 close friends. I don't want E2EE for 2000 member super groups. And the problem literally is, I don't have the option for E2EE 1:1 chats, they're N O T available for Linux desktop I use. We don't actually have the option. What Telegram has, is a sad excuse of E2EE 1:1 chats on limited platforms, which only functions in online debates. Telegram does NOT have E2EE in practice. If it had, I'd be having my chats on Telegram instead of Signal, and wouldn't have to raise awareness on the issue.