Telegram is asking German users when to share information with law enforcement | Hacker News Reader

Telegram is asking German users when to share information with law enforcement

147 pointsdanhor219 comments

Just went out to german users (translated with deepl):

We, the Telegram team, ask you to give us your opinion on how the data of German Telegram users may (or may not) be shared with German authorities, including the German police (BKA).

Telegram never shares information about your chats or contacts with third parties, including government agencies.

Nevertheless, to prevent misuse of our platform by terrorist groups, our current privacy policy since 2018 allows us to disclose IP addresses and phone numbers of terrorist suspects upon government request backed by a court order.

We're conducting this poll to find out if our German users support our current privacy policy or if they want to reduce or increase the number of cases where Telegram can potentially share data with authorities. We are providing three options to choose from.

OPTION 1: No changes. Telegram may continue to share IP addresses and phone numbers of terror suspects only based on a court decision. This option is already included in Telegram's current privacy policy.

OPTION 2: Upon request by German police authorities, Telegram may disclose IP addresses and phone numbers of suspects of serious crimes, even if not supported by a court decision. This option, if approved, would be completely new for Telegram and therefore requires a change to our privacy policy for users from Germany.

OPTION 3: Under no circumstances may Telegram share user information, including IP addresses and phone numbers of terror suspects. If this option is supported, Telegram will change its data structure and privacy policy for users from Germany.

Only users registered with German phone numbers can participate in the survey below. We have informed all Telegram users in Germany about this survey. The poll will remain open until September 5, 12:00 pm German time (UTC+2).

(Together with an attached poll)

Original: https://imgur.com/a/oHdxchb

View on HN

Hi, German here.

How about not storing any information at all? Nothing to give, problem solved. Just like Signal.

I seriously don’t understand why people use Telegram instead of Signal. Any reason! The app doesn’t solve any privacy problem, default chats are unencrypted, keeps personal info. App should be dead already or turned into a dating app because it’s clearly not seriously privacy fucused.

Sounds like option 3: "If this option is supported, Telegram will change its data structure and privacy policy for users from Germany."

I would prefer them to be clearer to say "we will redesign our systems so we no longer store IP addresses".

"Change our data structure" sounds like they might just host the servers outside the country and use a "Telegram Deutschland Inc" company that doesn't have access to any user data to run the service.

Even if they don’t store it: if they get a court order, and it requires to turn on IP logging, they will have yours the next time you log in.

Better than a history, at least.

Channels, Groups, it’s overall way better. But true, per default not as secure. Supports secure chats, that are secure.

Are channels and groups e2ee?

No. Is discord, reddit, hacker news e2ee? No, but they are still products people want to use.

Do you use discord, reddit, hacker news for private communication?

BTW reddit and Hackernews are E2EE, it's just that one E is public.

What is your HN key fingerprint? I’d like to compare it to know if our messaging is secure.

I'm not messaging to you but to HN via E2E https connection. You can't read that messages as they are transported, you can read them afterwards because HN makes them public not because my message wasn't send encrypted.

You seem to be mistaken about what the "ends" refer to in end to end encryption. If I whisper something in my friend's ear and she whispers it into your ear, that is not a secret message between you and me even if each "hop" was private.

E2E means no intermediaries see the plaintext, only the original sender and ultimate recipient see the plaintext. HN is not the recipient of your message, it's an intermediary.

With HTTPS alone, I can assure you that HN is, indeed, the recipient/end. If you post something like a PGP-encrypted message on HN, now you've got a situation where HN is no longer a recipient/end.

I think the better point to make is that we all collectively agree to refrain from using the term "end" (as in E2EE) in situations like the former, as it's misleading despite being accurate; please only use it for the latter.

Doesn't it depend on the application?

Messenger like the telegram are something different than sites like HN.

I am aware that I send my messages to HN, they are not forwarded to you but you open the HN page to read my response. HN is more like a message board with message hierarchy. The communication is public, the transmission path is encrypted.

It's more like whispering in your friends ear and she/he writes in down and pins it to a public board. My communication was private, but he/she is a chatterbox and I'm well aware of that.

BTW I didn't receive your reply but had to look it up on HN, so I maybe be your intended recipient but technically I'm not.

What does that even mean?

That your message is transferred from your computer to the recipient, HN's servers, encrypted. At no point should anyone in the middle be able to read your message. After arrival, HN then publishes it on a public forum for everyone to see.

Ah yes, the Zoom definition of E2EE! /s

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/08/zoom-to-pay-85m-...

Kind of, but as they aren't lying about allowing private conversations not really. More saying https is end to end encrypted, but what one end does with that data isn't necessarily private.

https on its own isn't e2ee:

>End-to-end encryption (E2EE) is a system of communication where *only the communicating users can read the messages*. In principle, it prevents potential eavesdroppers – including telecom providers, Internet providers, malicious actors, *and even the provider of the communication service* – from being able to access the cryptographic keys needed to decrypt the conversation.[1]

If the server can read the content, it isn't end-to-end encryption.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_encryption

The server is the communicating user in this instance, it is the intended recipient of the message. No potential eavesdropping can happen.

Even though I intend for you to read this message, I am sending it to the HN server to post publicly. My communication with HN is E2EE, my communication with you is not. This isn't meant to be useful information, and it certainly isn't advice. It's just an accurate nonstandard way of looking at things.

Telegram is just the middleman between sender and receiver. When you write on HN, the receiver is HN. That message is transported via E2E https encryption so it's secure. But because HN displays all messages publicly you can read them after they were received.

This doesn't change the fact that the transport as such is E2E.

There is a distinction between TLS and E2EE. E2EE is client to client encryption.

Ideally it would be the human at each end doing the encrypting and decrypting. But humans can't be bothered, so we let some code that we know very little about do it for us. Obviously having that code run on the client device (the one in your hand) is preferable to having it run elsewhere (like some web server), but either way the human (the true end) is delegating the job to an entity that isn't quite at the end, it's ever so slightly toward the center.

Things like PGP help to maximize the endianness, since the human has a better sense that the crypto software is legitimate, and can read the code before executing it, although there's still plenty of points of compromise between that code and the human (compiler, Intel ME, etc.) so unless you're doing crypto with a pencil and paper, you're always putting your trust somewhere that isn't precisely the "end."

You already know the answer to that.

They aren't meant to be.

The people signing up for telegram in droves aren't looking for a replacement for signal or wickr or whatever "secure" messaging platform.

They're joining their friends' group chats and subscribing to their friends' channels. It's a replacement for twitter/facebook more than anything else.

As secure as a fox who's just been appointed Professor of Security at Secure University?

I switched from signal to Telegram because the iphone version was buggy as hell. That's why.

Signal bugs on ios really are a pain point for people that I have convinced to switch. Even basic things, the ios app does not seem to use the correct camera API which makes using the internal camera lower quality which also makes video calls blurry.

https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-iOS/issues/5294

Poeple use it because the UX is great, as well as the bot DX. E2EE isn't a critical feature for most people picking a chat app.

Signal is a great alternative to WhatsApp. Not so much for Telegram.

Because you lose all your chat history without any way to export it.

I unfortunately have convinced some of my relatives to use Signal without me looking into it beforehand.

Now because of Signal’s moronic design I dread the day when something happens and I decide I want to save all our chats for posterity / memories, but wouldn’t be able to. There is simply no “export” button. There is some way to do it on Android but on iOS we are SOL.

https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007059752-Ba...

> Signal Desktop does not support transferring message history to or from any device.

> Migration Assistant and Time Machine for macOS are not supported.

Telegram seems to have captured some of thr discord market and seems to do "group" stuff a lot better UX wise.

To effectively capture discord usage telegram should add Group groups, that is to allow user to create an Organizations with some channels and groups.

Also some kind of shared access policy.

Could even be a pro feature.

I specifically like Telegram because it doesn't have group groups =)

I don't use discord or other complex chats much, are there annoyances that come up with group groups?

Desktop client already has it, it's called 'folders'.

That is client side; there is no functionality comparable to how discord groups chatrooms by server

Because it works flawlessly on all three major operating systems (windows, linux, macos), unlike Signal who can not make a decent linux port.

You can install Telegram with f-droid, and it works well on a degoogled phone. Signal forbids alternate clients and is not on f-droid. It's thus just not an option.

> Signal forbids alternate clients

Which might be due to their E2E encryption?!?

No, it's a management decision and not a technical limitation.

Strange, I have Signal on a de-googled Puxel 2 runnibg ClayxOS...

How can I install Signal on my Qubes OS or on Pinephone, if I don't have any Google or Apple phones?

But I guess you have an original Signal APK installed, not an alternative client that connects to Signal servers.

There are third party apps that connect to Signal's servers such as Molly. https://github.com/mollyim/mollyim-android

It was mainly moxie who was hell-bent against that though. I'm hoping they'll reverse their stance since he left. And on federation as well.

Moxie was against all these things because it would make new features more difficult to implement. But personally I care much more for an open infrastructure. Most of their new features weren't even useful.

I'm currently using a matrix bridge and I didn't get banned (officially that's a third party client too) so that's a good sign.

https://signal.org/android/apk/

Signal will send you a notification when updates are available, and self-update.

So will Telegram but at least they're not hostile towards F-Droid like Moxie.

UX of Signal is terrible. Part of that is a direct result of security-usability trade-offs.

> The app doesn’t solve any privacy problem, default chats are unencrypted, keeps personal info.

I am using it for public chats.

--------------------

EDIT: this is inacurate, see replies

For example I get repeated "insert PIN password here to remember it".

I have a password manager. There is no way to get rid of it, even via deeply hidden settings. For example, what about disabling it for password with length over 40? Or something?

I have a "pin reminders" setting in iOS signal that I can turn off. It's in Settings > Account

Thanks, used that! And edited my post. Either I missed it or they added it after I started using Signal.

> There is no way to get rid of it, even via deeply hidden settings.

At least on iOS: Settings > Account > [ ] PIN Reminders. I would be very surprised if there isn't a similar way of disabling those reminders on Android.

Thanks, used that! And edited my post. Either I missed it or they added it after I started using Signal.

...i havent inserted my android remind-pin for years.

> How about not storing any information at all? Nothing to give, problem solved. Just like Signal.

Yeah, give S̶i̶g̶n̶a̶l̶ Twilio your phone number instead. Problem solved.

> I seriously don’t understand why people use Telegram instead of Signal. Any reason! The app doesn’t solve any privacy problem, default chats are unencrypted, keeps personal info. App should be dead already or turned into a dating app because it’s clearly not seriously privacy fucused.

They don't care and Signal offers less that what Telegram has despite Telegram being less secure. Signal is bad at selling itself.

Maybe Signal needs to offer a better user experience, backup chats across all devices and offer more useful features; not less than their competitors rather than pushing a private cryptocurrency scam project useful for criminals, scammers and money launderers.

If the cryptocurrency weren't useful for criminals, scammers, and money launderers, then it wouldn't be useful for political dissidents either. The reason the undesirables use those technologies is because they work. Yes, bad people are going to use effective tools. Does that mean nobody should have them? Granted, I wish they would have just implemented Monero instead, especially since MobileCoin was (is?) unusable in the US. I agree they definitely could use some work on the backups side of the house as well.

Just to remind that Signal is bu//sh*t messenger that ask you for your phone number. And keep and share all the information with authorities. Since it is a US based company, and it is what US based companies do.

If you want to make a protected application, don't tie it to any real world data. That is very easy.

> And keep and share all the information with authorities.

Hilarious that you call it bullshit whilst spouting your own. https://signal.org/bigbrother/

Unless of course you have some documentation to back up what you're saying.

I love Signal, but in some jurisdictions government request for data can be accompanied by gagging orders with serious penalties for breach. I'm not sure that list can be considered complete.

Does the design of Signal's applications or server infrastructure change because of the jurisdiction? Does the information they gather or store change?

With signal can you join public/private channels without disclosing your phone number?

The last time I checked (a few years back) I only saw private groups and no way to hide phone numbers.

If that is still the case then there are less reason to have a warrant for you phone number as it is easier to access.

If you trust some random people over internet who publish anything, then my words should have the same power to you.

To be fair, those statements look a tad more official than your published comment.

>How about not storing any information at all?

That wouldn't work for groups. Abusers could then destroy the groups with impunity for the purpose of censorship. Telegram is mostly about groups. Telegram is often used for activism.

Signal claims to not store data about who is talking to who. That doesn't mean that they don't. If they were, say, a secret subsidiary of the CIA they would act exactly as they are acting now. In general you can't trust the providers of these sorts of things. See Crypto AG...

To some degree you can trust them, as data request to Signal have been through the court systems which is public. You can actually look up and see what data they have turned over after receiving court orders to do so.

Would a secret CIA subsidiary hand over data for a routine civilian court request? If anything not doing so would make their covert surveillance tool even more trustworthy and effective.

The only information Signal can provide is [1]:

  * Time of account creation 
  * Date of the account’s last connection to Signal servers.

That is all. If you want, the link below is the grand jury subpoena for Signal user data, Central District of California, in full.

[1] https://signal.org/bigbrother/cd-california-grand-jury/

That's my point, if Signal were a CIA front with some kind of secret backdoor, it would probably not reveal that in response to a request from a Central District of California grand jury.

The signal code is public and has been widely reviewed. We know full well what the server knows regardless of what they say.

Suppose an update is rolled out in app stores, and many people update to it. Suppose this new version contains surveillance instead of matching the published/reviewed code. Won't there be some substantial period of time during which many messages can be stolen before somebody eventually goes on twitter to say "hmm, wireshark shows more data than I'd expect" and/or "hmm, I can't get the source to build quite like the store's new apk"?

Then we're screwed. All mainstream applications running on modern general purpose computers are vulnerable to this.

You don't like that? Stop busting their balls and produce an alternative operating system and application update framework which is not vulnerable.

That means the end to end encryption (if you verify your identities) works. It says nothing about how much meta data Signal collects.

We know exactly how much metadata can be collected. You can just look at how the official client works. You can reverse engineer what the server has to do. This not a matter of uncertainty. Signal doesn't mention the collection of the push messaging device IDs explicitly. But that ID doesn't yield a government level adversary any advantage that they don't already have from knowing the phone number, so it doesn't matter. Contact intersection can be logged, then pre-imaged. We can't know. But we already know it can because we know how the clients work. That's it.

Signal doesn't claim cryptographic security against that metadata collection, but then there isn't currently any working system that can make such a claim, so why bust their balls over it?

That is at least an indication, but unfortunately not a proof. They could run modified versions on their servers, if they wanted.

No, it simply does not matter what modified version of their server they run. We know what the clients do, and we know what the servers can log. This is a fact as sure as day follows night, and that an apple will fall to the ground when dropped. It isn't even debatable. Your comment is incorrect, full stop.

I seriously don’t understand why people use Telegram instead of Signal. Any reason!

telegram is the only chat app that offers Free Software clients, does not force me to share my phonenumber, is easy enough to use even for old people.

matrix is ok. but element is still buggy and the ux is complex and takes some learning.

another alternative is deltachat. it uses smtp as transport and works with an email account. the UX is also easy enough to use. easier than matrix/element.

Signal require a phone number, a nogo for real privacy.

I believe Telegram requires a phone number, too.

It requires a phone number, but it doesn't require sharing the phone number with other people. On signal you are only reachable via the phone number, Telegram has User names and allows to hide the number from the profile.

It asks for a phone number when you sign up, but you don't have to share the phone number with people you want to add as a contact/share it in groups.

For a lot of people, Telegram does a good job of being "less evil than Facebook Messenger", and private in ways that matter to them. I'm more worried about some nutcase from a video game meetup group getting hold of my phone number than I am law enforcement finding out I was in that video game group in the first place.

I have a Matrix server and an XMPP server for 'truly private' communication anyway.

Let's see if Telegram gives the data to courts:

https://yro.slashdot.org/story/22/08/31/2210240/court-orders...

It's actually fun to use?

that's very subjective i suppose, i don't have much to compare it to. if by fun you mean stickers and animated emojis. sure. it doesn't get in my way. it is possible to find groups and people through searching for keywords. i can name my contacts as i like. (which matrix/element for example does not allow, and that's a real problem)

the only thing annoying is that anyone can just talk to me, whereas eg. in wechat people have to make a contact request before they can talk to me directly. but i have the impression that wechat is the unusual one here, which a feature that i'd like to see adapted by other messengers too.

i also miss wechat's feature of being able to choose a custom name for myself in each group. but again, i don't know if any other messenger offers that.

The multiple third party clients feature is huge for me. It’s means I’m not stuck with living with whatever set of trade offs have been made in the official client, and it means there are true native (UWP, UIKit, etc) clients for just about every platform that don’t use UI as branding and behave the way one would expect apps of those platforms to behave.

Last time I tried Telegram to see what it is like, it did automatically broadcast to all my contacts, that I use Telegram, and as a consequence people thought they could message me there, even though I was only testing the app. Also it did require associating with my phone/SIM. Do you mean, that it does not publish your phone number to other people on Telegram?

I keep an eye on deltachat, hoping, that it might become a viable alternative to phone number associated chat solutions. Not sure how mature deltachat is already.

it should have asked you about that broadcasting. i am very sensitive about that so i am careful not to allow it.

deltachat is pretty mature for the features that it has. one nice one is that the autocrypt feature works with some regular email clients, so you can exchange encrypted deltachat messages with people who don't have a deltachat client.

it handles groups, image sharing, and integrates videochat with a configurable url (so you can use any video chat that can be opened through a webbrowser)

> How about not storing any information at all?

Acc to telegram:

> Telegram may disclose IP addresses and phone numbers

How do you propose this data is masked? You need a phone number to use Telegram (and Signal), and you need an internet connection, thus exposing your IP address.

I’m not sure why you think Signal does not have this information.

Matrix won't have this information, if you have your own server.

Signal has been subpoena'd in the past, and the only relevant information they were able to provide were account creation date and account's last connection date. Literally nothing else. It's actually a little funny to read:

https://signal.org/bigbrother/cd-california-grand-jury/

That was in the past though. Now Signal is storing exactly that same information permanently in the cloud. Specifically they store your name, phone number, photo, and a record of every person you contact.

Metadata is enough to execute people (by certain country but anywhere in the world--it is immoral for Signal to position itself as secure if it provides such data).

Last I checked Signal was outright lying in their privacy policy which was never updated after they started collecting and storing user data in the cloud. You can't morally market yourself as secure while you lie to your users about what their risks are.

When did that change and how do you know about this?

But did you actually read that? It specifically doesn’t mention the obvious data that they do have (phone and IP), but instead focus on other sensitive metadata:

> variety of information we don’t have, including the target’s name, address, correspondence, contacts, groups, calls.

I don't get why anyone uses Signal.

Horrible UX compared to WhatsApp, no sync of messages between devices, walled garden like WhatsApp, you can't have your own custom client

only thing: not Facebook & open source

You can have all of that with a Matrix client (except good UX, that's unique to Telegram)

> why anyone uses Signal.

> not Facebook

Bingo!

I'm not sure what you mean. Messages sync just fine between my iPhone and Linux machine.

> Horrible UX

It got way better in the past few years. When I did the initial push with my friends, we failed. Mainly because the basic functionality was buggy at times, such as messages that would simply not be received. But now it's running real smooth imo. Sure, there are a few things I would like to see. Polls is a big one. Maybe a smooth gif creation like WhatsApp -- but those are fairly minor. My experience is that it gets pretty much the job done and that's all I want from it. What exactly is so horrible about it in your experience?

> only thing: not Facebook & open source

Those two are pretty big positives, at least for me. That's pretty much exactly what I'm looking for.

> You can have all of that with a Matrix client

Well ... unfortunately that's a bit much for your average Joe, simple as.

No they don't sync just fine. A device cannot receive chat history from before it was added and signal regularly "forgets" linked devices, losing all messages on the device and starting from scratch after relinking.

>How about not storing any information at all? Nothing to give, problem solved.

This means no history sync, no seamless device switching, no contact discovery, no search. That's not what people want.

>I seriously don’t understand why people use Telegram instead of Signal. Any reason!

Very easy to integrate custom notifications with bots. Signal is more like "maybe it works with this 3rd party tool". Also being able to use custom buttons with bots.

> why people use Telegram instead of Signal

Telegram has a great bot feature, that you can use to do a bunch of stuff (from smart house notifications, to "uptime robot" tracking of services up/down states, build results, temperature alarms, server monitoring, etc. One curl oneliner, and you get a message on your phone with whatever data needed (even with an image/graph or a file attachment).

> I seriously don’t understand why people use Telegram instead of Signal. Any reason!

Any reason? I’ll give you some serious ones.

Signal sucks really bad on user experience and features. If you try both for a week or two and learn about the features, you’d be able to conclude the same.

Signal does not care about users and prevents backups on iOS. Lose your device or delete the app due to some issues and reinstall? All your chats are gone!

Signal still has message delivery issues (like long delays)…it’s 2022!!!

Signal keeps pestering me to allow notifications and to allow contacts access. I can only choose “Not Now”, since there is no option that says “No”. When I choose “Not Now”, it will say “we’ll remind you later” and pester me again. I don’t understand why anyone would assume that this app cares about privacy or about users’ time.

Signal operates on the idea that anything sent through chat is ephemeral and not worth keeping, which just doesn’t work in practice in my experience.

When you’re knee deep in conversation with someone you’re probably not going to say, “oh hey we should switch to email so we can keep a record of this”. It might not even occur to you that the conversation could ever be of value.

There’s been several occasions when my life has been made much more easy for having been able to dig up some old message in iMessage, Telegram, etc from as far back as multiple years ago sometimes because the way things played out the pertinent info didn’t exist anywhere else simply because nobody involved could’ve ever guessed it had any importance.

> Signal operates on the idea that anything sent through chat is ephemeral and not worth keeping, which just doesn’t work in practice in my experience.

Why do you think that? Did you lose any messages? 'cause I can scroll back months and still see all my messages there. Never noticed any loss.

As mentioned in parent comment:

> Signal does not care about users and prevents backups on iOS. Lose your device or delete the app due to some issues and reinstall? All your chats are gone!

Switching out devices is something that happens often enough for many users that transferring history should not be an ordeal. Even the most careful users will occasionally break their phones, and sometimes people need to switch platforms for whatever reason.

WhatsApp suffers from this issue too, at least when trying to migrate histories between platforms.

just to add, telegram can NOT transfer or back up E2E encrypted chats either. unencrypted chats transfer because they are saved on the telegram server.

i think deltachat is possibly the only one that can transfer encrypted messages because you can copy the encryption keys and the messages are just mails, easy to copy (and usually stored on your mail server too)

i don't know how matrix handles this, but from the way verification works there, i am not confident.

Signal can do that. Both on Android and iOS. What it can't do on iOS is to create regular Backups (which it can on Android).

https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007059752-Ba...

I think it has something to do that Signal won't trust iCloud as Backup target.

I for one am 100% satisfied with Signals UX, and a big reason for that it precisepy that it does not evolve into a communications platform, but just pushes chats around. The delivery issues are very rare, and not a btother anyways. Chat is not time sensitive nor should it be.

Signal cares about privacy (unlike Telegram) and the evidence is right there in their respective source repositories.

> Signal sucks really bad on user experience and features. If you try both for a week or two and learn about the features, you’d be able to conclude the same.

Hm, for me Signal does all I need: Chat, voice chat, video chat, group chat, sending text, pictures, videos, whatever. All of that of course encrypted and not financed by a Russian millionaire/billionaire.

> Signal still has message delivery issues (like long delays)…it’s 2022!!!

Haven't noticed those. How sure are you, that your contacts are actually looking at Signal messages (two filled cirles checkmarks) or have network to receive the messages (two unfilled circles checkmarks)?

> Signal keeps pestering me to allow notifications and to allow contacts access. I can only choose “Not Now”, since there is no option that says “No”. When I choose “Not Now”, it will say “we’ll remind you later” and pester me again. I don’t understand why anyone would assume that this app cares about privacy or about users’ time.

OK, that's really annoying then. I usually use Signal on my computer, from which it works very nicely and never asks me any of those things.

> Signal does not care about users and prevents backups on iOS. Lose your device or delete the app due to some issues and reinstall? All your chats are gone!

My chats being gone from new devices is one reason I use Signal over others.

> Signal still has message delivery issues (like long delays)…it’s 2022!!!

I've sent tens or hundreds of thousands of messages over the course of years and the only time i've had delays is when I had spotty service.

Telegram and Signal has basically same problem. Thats centralised storage of data. So if you care about privacy, Signal is not alternative to Telegram.

Matrix is decentralised open-source solution. I don't understand why people don't use it more instead of Signal or Telegram. Or Session, but it is not very user friendly.

> How about not storing any information at all? Nothing to give, problem solved. Just like Signal.

just so you know, Signal does permanently store sensitive user data in the cloud. They collect your name, photo, phone number, and a list of every person you contact using Signal. That data is stored in your profile on their servers.

Signal really used to not store anything, but that hasn't been the case for a long time now and if this is the first you're hearing about that, it should tell you all you need to know about how trustworthy Signal is.

Moxie rubs me the wrong way and I don't trust him. So defacto, I don't trust signal.

Sadly I think that it is the slippery slope for Telegram. Instead of the spirit of privacy first, they start to concede little by little for commercial interests.

First it is just the IP and phone number. Then, it will be extended to contacts. Because, why not, that can be useful also for "terrorist investigations". Then it will be chat history,because it makes sense, the police has a warrant... And telegram is technically able to...

Also, clever poll tactic to put the option 1 as looking 'moderate' in front of other extreme options.

Also, for the fighting "terrorism" argument, just remember that we are all terrorists for Russia, and that even in Europe (Germany, France, ...), A lot of high ranking gov and police officials were found guilty of corruption or abusing the system for their own interests!

The majority is currently for a court order, which doesn't indicate a slippery slope. If they wanted to be shady, they wouldn't have made a poll at all, which also implies the expectation of discussion around the topic.

What do you mean by "for commercial interests"?

In part I am curious about how these requests are made; I would expect that the 2 most common kind of request are from law enforcement following public channels/groups, from individual reports of private conversations, and from previous investigations.

That is I imagine requests would be in the shape of "here is a username give us IP and phone number".

It is also relevant to know whether German courts can order to collect this information, it is also relevant that German courts apply German jurisdiction universally (an example there are African war lords convicted of war crimes that have no relation to Germany or German citizens).

Personally I would prefer privacy first companies to focus on lobbying the idea that these kind of court orders are to be used sparingly rather than enter an adversarial arm race with regulators.

Do you really think that corruption uses court orders of fabricated terrorism cases as regular means to abuse the system? If that’s true, Europe is screwed up regardless of how a popular messenger handles your ip.

Anyway, “slippery slope” is an extrapolation and not an argument, cannot be used as such. You can naively extrapolate everything, e.g. I was too lazy to take out the trash today … and then I’ll try heroin. I couldn’t get a raise and switched jobs … and then I will be trafficking humans. I disagreed with my spouse … the divorce is imminent. I asked customers what they think of a complex issue … I will sell their laundry to everyone. This is all nonsense.

> Court orders of fabricated terrorism cases as regular means to abuse the system

Yes literally all the time in the United States.

The horseman of the privacy apocalypse is roughly - Terrorism, Drugs, and CP.

If a system can be abused, it will be abused. We have seen this play out in America and people are still not learning from these events. There are other ways to investigate suspects without sacrificing principals of privacy and spoiling it for the majority of 99.5% innocent human beings.

This is a sufficiently general argument against all law enforcement capabilities, though. Give the police any power at all and it's inevitable that someone will abuse it at some point in the future. Typically, most communities nonetheless decide on some level of rules, checks, and capabilities somewhere between "nothing" and "everything," accepting that which risks and tradeoffs are worth it might change over time. It seems to be largely only Hacker News that thinks law enforcement should never get any access to any data at all, ever.

What are these other ways to investigate suspects you're thinking that are preferable to building out networks from Telegram metadata? Bugging houses? Threatening family members to rat people out? Deep cover covert agents? Are any of those less subject to abuse?

This is a strange place to end up; you make a convincing argument against the somewhat unsophisticated and very common capstone of digital privacy. But if you really want to be private online, there are always ways, if not existent, possible, and if not possible, likely being worked on or a product of some future innovation. We end up at the “well you can’t stop it anyways,” point.

Do we only then use digital services to spy on those not savvy enough or careful enough to be private? What if everyone achieves Signal level privacy, or better? We end up having to answer the same question as before: what other methods are possible.

What if everyone achieves Signal level privacy, or better?

They get banned of it eventually, exactly the reason why this thread exists (telegram evaluates an idea of staying in Germany by relaxing some privacy rules, remember? It’s not their decision, but Germany’s). When reality changes, so do rules, they are not set in “capstone”. A couple of demolished buildings and the general public starts asking: why do we have so much of <whatever comes to mind> when it’s clearly dangerous.

Slippery slopes are a logical fallacy for a reason.

We live in a society, I don’t see how giving out basic information to law enforcement with a court order is somehow a fault of the company - first of all, your mobile service provider knows orders of magnitude more info on you (and quite likely sells it as well), second of all, your employer will do the same without a second thought as well as your bank, etc.

Slippery slope arguments should not be regarded as logical arguments. They are predictions. Calling it a logical fallacy is a strawman argument because in reality, slippery slopes have been observed.

Someone needs to coin the “We live in a society” fallacy already. We could call it the “Mark Renton Fallacy” for short. There’s no such thing as society, and even if there is I most certainly have nothing to do with it. Save for at tax time.

Slippery slope because the first step is hard to pass: share any data.

Then, just share a few of them, not a big step but it starts the machine of making it easy to share more and more little by little.

First IP, then IP and phone nb, then IP, phone nb, and connection log, then IP, phone, connection log, and geodata; then IP, phone nb, connection log, location data; then IP, phone nb, connection log, location data, contacts; Then IP, phone nb, connection lots, location data, contacts, chats ...

If you look at the "because terrorism" reason, it can apply at any of these data.

No one will say: we think they are terrorist, share their IP but not their location or their chat.

I don’t think the companies sharing the info is wrong. I think sealed warrants and sealed indictments are wrong. The accused/suspected should have a chance to fight to maintain privacy.

At a minimum, users should be informed that their info was shared with government.

Note that they didn't provide options for "with a warrant" and "without a warrant", they only provided options for "with a warrant but only for suspected terrorism" and "for any serious crime but without a warrant". I suspect some users would vote for "any serious crime with a warrant" but will now vote for option 1 because they still want a warrant.

You're right, there is no option for "serious crime but only with warrant".

Option 1 is more strict in both ways. Only Terrorism (which is more serious than "just" crime) and even then only with a warrant. Option 2 is unacceptable (IMO). "serious crime" is too ambiguous and without a warrant prone to misuse.

Option 2 is clearly the "but the children!" solution which will fuck us all over.

The first option is leading right now so that's probably correct. In general germans are pretty trusting of the justice system, so I'd expect "serious crime with warrant" to win (at least I'd vote for it).

I think this is very important: The poll is intended to be able to claim that their users want as little cooperation as possible. And giving the "((1+2)/2). any serious crime but WITH a warrant" option would have undermined that, so they manipulate the poll.

At least that's what I'm reading into this. Picking option #2 was my personal "f..k y.." to them for this manipulation; not that it changes anything. (I really don't want to have a company share info without a warrant, but when a court warrant is issued they should comply).

That is my reading. They want users to pick option 1 as most users likely don't want them to cooperate WITHOUT a warrant and thus option 2 creates a false dichotomy.

It's worth noting that a lot of fringe extremists (but not necessarily terrorists) fled from WhatsApp to securer alternatives like Signal and Telegram, especially "COVID deniers" (which, to be clear, refers to a far-right political strategy). So blatantly ignoring warrants is probably good publicity for a vocal part of its userbase.

Telegram is not a privacy-focused messenger. It is not a messenger at all, it is a dialog-based development platform, like WeChat. Most of its value is in public channels and groups, and bots. It is dead simple to build a useful Telegram bot; good luck doing this on Signal.

Wire and Threema are serious privacy-focused messengers. They have all things necessary for good privacy: full E2E, pseudonymous IDs not linked to phone numbers, multiple accounts, ephemeral accounts, side-channel authentication, etc.

Signal is something in between. It is not enough for state of the art privacy (as it is linked to phone numbers which are really tightly coupled to real-world identities), and it doesn’t provide a lot of features to be a good development platform. I think it is stuck in its current state, and no longer evolving.

> Wire and Threema are serious privacy-focused messengers. They have all things necessary for good privacy: full E2E, pseudonymous IDs not linked to phone numbers, multiple accounts, ephemeral accounts, side-channel authentication, etc.

Matrix offers all that, and bots and public channels

Matrix is good, too. It is not polished enough yet, and they need to work on content discovery, but otherwise I like them, too.

I think when people compare Matrix/Element a bit differently than all others. It is federated chat client (like email), that along is something worth considering for people who wants to keep their message and communication channel open. All the other chat program, such as What's App, Signal, Wire all belong in the same universe much like AOL back then. Signal actually discourage others from running their own servers. Matrix allows us to have our own domain and address, which is forever ours. If we don't like the provider that is running our server, we can just start our own (just like email). For that along I would rather support a version of Element.io/Matrix.org than another other programs.

> It is dead simple to build a useful Telegram bot; good luck doing this on Signal.

Well, obviously because Telegram officially allows and supports bots and WhatsApp doesn't and actively tries to ban them.

Thats more of a policy difference than a technical or conceptual difference IMO.

If a company stores data about you, they WILL give it ALL to law enforcement.

How to avoid this?

Don't store any data, as simple as that.

Use p2p E2EE services. The server will only orchestrate between connections but no actual data will pass through it, giving the cops absolutely nothing except connection logs! Sure, they can still see when you connected and who you requested to talk with, but there are many mitigations and (unless they actively sniff you) they won't even have a byte of data you actually sent to that person

Current stats as of 30.08.22 14:22 are (1,166,650 votes):

41% OPTION 1: No changes. Telegram may continue to share IP addresses and phone numbers of terror suspects only based on a court decision

21% OPTION 2: Upon request by German police authorities, Telegram may disclose IP addresses and phone numbers of suspects of serious crimes, even if not supported by a court decision.

34% OPTION 3: Under no circumstances may Telegram share user information, including IP addresses and phone numbers of terror suspects.

4% No opinion / I am not from Germany

That's too bad. I was hoping Germans would massively vote option 3. They are a privacy conscious people after all. And that option would bring it in line with Signal (with the unfortunate difference that not all chats are encrypted by default)

> They are a privacy conscious people after all.

No, sorry, we are not. Not by a long shot. Most people here do not have a good understanding of these issues and "just want to live their life", meaning continue to be uninformed, as long as it is convenient.

It is quite difficult to even get people to try Signal or other option, to really give it a chance, because they are so prone to the network effect. They install all kinds of shit apps on their phones, but one more privacy friendly chat app? Nahhhh ...

I’m registered with German phone number, but did not receive it. Now it’s interesting which country do they think I’m in and what kind of privacy I can expect based on that.

Is there anything special going on in Germany atm to prompt this? I‘m slighlty confused why they would do such a poll…

Yes, a lot of pressure from the leftist government. Many channels opposing the German Covid policy (one of a kind in Europe, very strict) are to be found in Telegram. As always, there is also some German right in Telegram. The government is officially after them, but the media/government has been painting all those opposing the Covid measures as right, so… it’s tricky.

> (one of a kind in Europe, very strict)

This is wrong. The German COVID policy is not strict at all. There is a 5 day isolation if you test positive, and you usually have to wear a mask on public transport. That's literally it.

Compare it for the whole of 2022. Also still in Germany, some people can/will lose their job if they don’t take the jab. Now I’m not affected by this, but my sister was. She decided to move country instead of getting vaccinated again.

> Compare it for the whole of 2022

Why should I do that?

> but the media/government has been painting all those opposing the Covid measures as right

Idk about you, but waving flags of the German Reich, following known Neo-Nazis and attending events of far-right organizations, while spreading lies and slogans that originate from right-wing conspiracy theorists, seems kinda right-wingy to me.

Never claim there are no such people. But to try to paint a picture as e.g. most of mainstream media did and some still do, that only such kind of people protest the measures etc. is not correct.

I remember lots of documentations on TV and interviews with social scientists that emphasize that the Covid protests in Germany are weirdly originating from a very broad spectrum, with lots of alternative and esoteric groups, which aren't right wing at all. The Verfassungsschutz even had to invent a new category: https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/verfassungsschutz-querdenke...

Some examples of mainstream media that emphasize the heterogeneous nature of these protests:

https://www.tagesschau.de/faktenfinder/esoterik-impfgegner-c...

https://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/mensch/corona-demonstrat...

https://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/corona-demos-zwischen-hi...

https://www.rnd.de/panorama/esoteriker-auf-corona-demos-tanz...

https://www.faz.net/aktuell/politik/inland/corona-proteste-q...

So I don't think your assessment is fair.

I also remember analysis that this broad spectrum was circumvented, and heavily influenced by the far right.

Well, then post some sources.

I actually grew up with esoterics due to my mom. The major problem is, that they don't accept facts that are verifiable by scientific means. They think everything is subjective and therefore everything you can think of is somehow true. This makes them especially perceptible to propaganda efforts, which is why there is a distinct brown flavor to many esoteric practices and theories.

They may not be considered right-wing, but they are falling quite easily for those rat catchers.

Just take the "Truther" movement. Those guys were readily spreading antisemtic bullshit in the last 20 years. They were quite successful in the esoteric scene.

I would argue nowadays it’s very difficult to discern what is the true science and what is just preached as being the science. Even giving the best intent, things are murky if you’re not biased. Let’s take this tweet for example:

https://twitter.com/martinkulldorff/status/15645903371375493... The look at Great Barrington Declaration. Then look at what the vaccines were promised to do by the authorities and politicians in power, and what the outcome truly was.

You do know that the "leftist" government came to power last year? And that the Merkel-CDU-conservative led government that put those "harsh" measures in place? And that the oeftist government coalition includes the FDP, liberals whose economic positions are almost GOP like?

Germany repeatedly threanened to ban or remove Telegram from app stores if they ignore requests to delete channels or to provide some data. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wired.com/story/germany-tel...

If I were in telegrams position, I would move this power to 'moderators' rather like Reddit. Then tell the government that if they want to use a court order to remove content, they need to request that the independent moderators of the channel do it.

Why would any court or government care about Telegram/Reddit saying that?

Well they would redesign systems so that they don't have any visibility into message or channel contents, and if they are notified of a channel with bad content, they would just say 'contact the moderator of the channel'.

Rather like ISP's today aren't responsible for the web pages they deliver - the HTTPS encryption means they couldn't scan or block them even if they wanted to.

But then they will make it illegal to provide these services and jail the telegram team instead.

> Rather like ISP's today aren't responsible for the web pages they deliver - the HTTPS encryption means they couldn't scan or block them even if they wanted to.

ISP's can be required to in fact not deliver certain webpages, usually for copyright reasons. If Telegram redesigns its system like you suggested the courts may just shift to:

Do not broadcast, transmit or make available the channel with the ID XYZ. The channel might not be deleted of course, but if it's no longer accessible that would be essentially the same.

Telegram is considered a platform for people, which do not respect the basic values of democracy like groups far right expressing xenophobia and groups which think (and express loudly) of the COVID measures as repression by some elite against the common citizen. Most of them whish for a autoritarian government. Groups which act against the constitution are observed by the Verfassungsschutz, an authority to protect the democracy and constitution in Germany. On telegram those extreme thoughts can be shared whithin their bubble which catalysts them. I don't know if this is the majority of users of Telegram (probably not), but it is strongly associated with them.

Those are the things I gathered by lightly consuming news. Maybe this is some kind of preparation for winter, where COVID cases are expected to rise in combination with very high energy prices.

The „funny“ thing is that they discuss anti-democratic topics in public, open groups and channels. They are for the vast majority completely technologically illiterate and somehow associate Telegram with secrecy. But they are in fact publicly broadcasting their wishes to reverse authorities. Any investigators can just join a group and see almost everything they are planning out loud.

On the surface you are correct, this is especially the painted picture by the mass media and at least partially by the government (who also sought banning Telegram entirely in Germany). If you go deeper, you get to see that also a lot of human rights activists and NGOs are using it. Have been using Telegram since 2015, and in the meantime, most of my IT buddies use it and/or Signal.

With the invasion of Ukraine it seems like 95 % of the information out of Ukraine flows through Telegram (I'm not a user myself but the watermark and screenshots of the app are everywhere).

Telegram also has some ~700 million monthly active users - it seems unlikely to me that there are even 700 million alt-right people in the entire world.

It’s not and everyone knows it, including those arguing against it. The really painful thing is, Germany still has a right problem. They can be found everywhere, including in police, military, political system, media etc. Multiple scandals offer evidence, but the daily life also shows stuff not covered by this. But this situation and widespread knowledge of this is also used in order to intimidate the others, that are not on the right at all. And this is not only a reality in Germany, unfortunately.

Ukrainian here. Almost 100% of war videos goes through Telegram, possibly because Youtube does not like videos with blood and murders, and 0% goes from something like torrents or self-hosted.

Yes, I agree that the reports on Telegram are mostly focused on right wing groups. I think that it's in ins very own nature that if there is a space for non conforming right wing ideas, there is also a space for other ideas that do not fit particularly well into the mainstream opinion. I would consider human rights activism and some work of NGOs as at least unpleasant for the government which would be a good reason to pay attention on where the communication happens.

We should ban IRC next because all the swastikas floating around.

In Spain telegram is mainly used by people who self identify as far left ...

In Italy it is mostly far left anarchists that use Telegram to organise, but there are far right Italians that use it, surely.

People who think that the COVID measures were repressive wish for an authoritarian government? Get your propaganda right.

Not all of course, is difficult to translate the word "Queerdenker" to English. I think we can agree that those have a significant overlap with "Reichsbürger", right politics, etc. They are not considered the core of society.

Yes Telegram is being smeared pretty badly in the German press, but to even consider people who have a disagreement with _huge_ cuts into personal liberty as a threat to basic democracy means that nobody should take them seriously.

"basic values of democracy" was redefined by Nancy Fraeser, Home Secretary. According to her only those people who align with the values of government are democrats.

https://www.cicero.de/innenpolitik/nancy-faeser-und-kommende...

So she's basically considering every upcoming protest against government due to exorbitant high energy price being anti-constitutional and undermined by violent right-wing extremists.

This is not somy dystopian future, this is Germany 2022.

"Telegram: An important opposition tool abroad, a radicalising cesspit at home."

https://twitter.com/argonerd/status/1296552428620451842?lang...

Well, Telegram is my main messenger and I don't associate myself with any of the mentioned groups. I think most of your impressions are bit bit over the top. That's not your fault as the media likes to paint Telegram in that light. Sure, there are these channels and yes Telegram tries to be light on censoring them, focusing only on the public and dangerous ones but still, claiming "Telegram is considered a platform for people, which do not respect the basic values of democracy" is a bit much as you could replace Telegram with the name of any social media/messenger platform.

This was no accusation to anybody using telegram, I use it myself. I just wanted to paint a picture of the sentiment towards Telegram in Germany and give some insight why they could act this way

I am a telegram user, I use it download my native language telenovelas for watching over weekend. Friday evening is the only time I open telegram.

Yes, see the German article: Gouvernment and Developer conflict about free speech, cyber bullying,, ... .

https://www.golem.de/news/an-die-polizei-telegram-bittet-nut...

Thanks a lot! This is what I was looking for.

I like how they are actually asking users, and not only "privacy-advocats" (who obviously push for option 3) or similar vocal subgroups.

Currently the poll stands at:

* OPTION 1: 40%

* OPTION 2: 21%

* OPTION 3: 35%

* (no opinion): 4%

with 1.3 million votes so far.

I like the outcome (personally, I don't think the "store nothing" approach of OPTION 3 is really necessary), although the 21% that push for even less privacy are a bit concerning

Those numbers still hold exactly like this at 1.6 million votes.

I have a screenshot from this morning with 360k votes. It was 41%|21%|34%|4%. Kind of funny that is stays so stable.

Can others confirm? I’m a Telegram user, located in Germany, with a German phone number and didn’t receive such a message.

Confirmed.

I can confirm. After selecting an answer the poll even shows percentages.

What's the percentage now?

Not German, but still want to know

41% Option 1, 21% Option 2, 34% Option 3, 4% abstention

Since the poll already has >1.1 million votes, I wouldn't expect those numbers to change a lot

A percentage point moved from 1. -> 3.

maybe burried by the messages directly after that one? at least for me after the poll there are two messages about animated emoji

me neither

confirmed also, got it on my two phones

Takes a while to be sent out, I guess. My wife got her notification in the morning, I got mine 5 or 6 hours later.

PSA: Just a friendly reminder that definition of "terror" tends to differ wildly from government to government.

Asking your users is cute, but at the end of the day, when you're served with a government request, the government prevails.

Lots of people here in Germany use Telegram for their purchases of substances (a serious crime here) because they consider it safe. If there's a danger of Telegram sharing their data with the police, the app is no longer safe. If it it's no longer safe for one thing, people won't use it for anything.

Source? I use Telegram as a normal messenger because it has a good UI.

Anecdotally, I live in Germany and use it for that almost exclusively, and know a couple of coworkers who also use Telegram like this.

for their purchases of substances

Purchases are where the sales at. Strange that these sellers aren’t using more secure messengers.

I believe that illegal activity is a good litmus test for a messenger, much better than forum theories or headlines. If for some reason drug dealers stay away from particular apps, so should you.

I don't think I was asked despite having a German IP and phone number

did you scroll up in the "Telegram" (service-notification) channel? The poll is in there

I wasn't asked either and I'm from Germany with a German phone number.

I scrolled up to 2016 - then it ends

What are the odds the founders/developers of Telegram are being coerced towards this based on a possibility of evidence of illegal activities they may have done/do actively in their life? The odds certainly aren't zero?

I wonder if such 'polls' would work to gate all major changes to a popular app?

Eg. Would users have been more accepting of YouTube removing the dislike button if the proposal had won a user poll?

Where are German users supposed to have received this message? I'm not German but my telegram account is registered with a German number and I haven't received anything

I've received the message an hour ago.

Via the chat labeled "Telegram" with the verification mark, the one you also get info about new features from when there's an update.

I don't know why, but the last info I got there was "Telegram surpassed 500 (https://t.me/durov/147) million active users. " from more than a year ago, and a few login codes

don't share info, it might sound good now (stopping terror attacks etc) but it will snowball into oppressive governments tracking down political 'criminals'. the police will have to find another way to catch terroists.

The (current) results sadden me:

1.26 mio. votes; Option 1 (41%), Option 2 (21%), Option 3 (34%), Option 4 (4%).

Yeah I would have expected more getting the Germans as well.

The categorical statement "Telegram never shares information about your chats or contacts with third parties, including government agencies" is simply dishonest. The word "never" is incorrect.

They don't. When they do, they only share IP Address and Phone number and only when it's a court order. Even FBI's leaked document confirmed this.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com