I agree Telegram is a worse choice for security, but I think it’s important to know specific differences and not just simplify to “not secure”, because that approach’s flip side - believing simply that “Signal is good and secure” - leads to mistakes like applying the law of defaults only to Telegram, not Signal.

> For that reason alone, Telegram‘s "secure chat" is anything but.

I didn't think that particular Telegram feature was affected in any way by any option, only that they needed to be started explicitly but were always secure no matter what.

So I immediately went looking through my settings and found an option that leaks tracking info by default, even in Secure Chats.

Signal, by default, routes all calls through their server. The option of using P2P connections for better latency and call quality is opt-in.

Telegram? See [1]. I found no evidence that Secure Chat calls are any different from regular calls.

1: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/telegram-leak...

it's worse than that. secure chat in telegram is very limited. you can't save anything shared in them. for most practical applications, like talking to friends and family you don't even want to use secure chat. if it were default you'd have to turn it off most of the time