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Comment by bognition | Hacker News Reader

I can't help but think this means that all my telegram conversations will now be fed into grok. I'm curious how I'd go about verifying that this is or isn't going to be the case.

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I'm thinking about most of my communications on Telegram and it's kind of hilarious to imagine it suddenly starting to reply to people on Xitter with unsolicited horny furry roleplay instead of unsolicited white supremacist rants.

Not so hilarious that it doesn't make me want to consider trying to convince all my circles to move to a community-run Matrix server or something though.

Looks like we're at the point where it's both convenient and useful to destroy and recreate entirely new digital identities every few months.

The only cheap way out for users is to generate noise. Clog up their systems with useless data.

Yeah, sounds like they finally accepted that tweets don't make LLM smarter, only less biased, and so they're doubling down to feed more tweet-like data to make it smart and biased.

No I am sure the fine and morally upstanding leadership of xAI are paying $300M just for the fun of it.

Why wouldn't you automatically assume this is the case?

I wouldn’t trust X or Elon Musk, and $300M is the kind of money that you can ask for a lot of things from the recipient.

It’s not X or Elon musk that you have to trust with regards to the privacy of your telegram conversations.

Yes it's some rich Russian dude trading with Elmo.

FTFY.

Yes, it's some ̵r̵i̵c̵h̵ ̵R̵u̵s̵s̵i̵a̵n̵ ̵d̵u̵d̵e̵ ̵t̵r̵a̵d̵i̵n̵g̵ ̵w̵i̵t̵h̵ Russian president calling Elmo.

Because it's expensive and telegram already is bot traffic to a large portion (channels, bots, ...) that would be completely useless for training.

Did you have an expectation of privacy using Telegram? I think that's the real issue here. If you were paying for Telegram, then I would say yes, those conversation should not be handed over to xAI. But, if you were ostensibly not paying for it, then I think it should be assumed that use of the service is considered consent to take that and use it as they please.

So yeah, it's almost certain that everything you ever put into Telegram is in Grok.

That’s not at all how consent works

Seeing that telegram is clear text by default, you should consider alternatives that offer end to end encryption by default.

It's not clear text by default, it's just not end-to-end encrypted. Messages are still encrypted between client and server.

I agree about considering alternatives though.

Ok so theyre plaintext on the server, encrypted in transit just means https

> Messages are still encrypted between client and server.

This is just a clever way of saying they use TLS, which I would be shocked if any mainstream app is not using.

Don't look under the hood at sms then

SMS is never claiming to be E2E nor is any army of SMS defenders online talking about how some virtue of SMS is almost same as E2E. While I don't like Telegram I will happily admit it is better than SMS, but how is that an argument for anything.

SMS isn't an app, it's a protocol that was created in 1992.

Is the server -> FSB connection encrypted?

End-to-end encryption isn't going to help if the chatbot/data harvester is embedded in the app itself.

Or if the endpoints are mostly pwned by NSA at all times (Android, Windows).

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