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> Telegram links an account to a telephone number. > If you want to use secure and private apps, I recommend: Signal Private Messenger: https://signal.org.. ht

> Telegram links an account to a telephone number. > If you want to use secure and private apps, I recommend: Signal Private Messenger: https://signal.org.. https://signal.org... I feel it's wrong to criticise Telegram for using phone numbers, and then in the same breath recommend Signal.

Erlich_Bachman 8y ago
Why do all messengers keep requiring phone numbers? Is it because of the problem of spam? Couldn't this easily be prevented by for example requiring consent before sending messages to new contacts? You could for example have it work 2 ways: 1) require a phone number connected to message unknown contacts. 2) without phone number, requiring prior consent from any new unknown contact, to message them.
- nebulous1 8y ago
  Ease of use
- unicornporn 8y ago
  > Why do all messengers keep requiring phone numbers? Matrix/Riot.im and Wire doesn't. I think they're both good alternatives.
  - ekianjo 8y ago
    Wire only if you register first on a computer. from the phone if you create an account you have to use your number.
    - walterbell 8y ago
      They seem to have changed this now, you can register with an email address from mobile. It still asks for a phone number, but you can say no.
      - ekianjo 8y ago
        That has probably changed recently indeed.
  - theshrike79 8y ago
    Riot.im is a damn pain to set up. I've been using computers for a quarter of a decade and I still get flummoxed by the UX. Bridging Matrix/Riot to IRC/Telegram/Whatever seems to require some black magick beyond my capabilities. On the other hand, even my grandmother can (and has) set up Telegram and WhatsApp.
    - unicornporn 8y ago
      Have you had a look lately? Plenty has happened in the last year (not only on the UX front)! https://media.ccc.de/v/35c3-9400-matrix_the_current_status_and_year_to_date https://media.ccc.de/v/35c3-9400-matrix_the_current_status_a... http://riot.im/experimental http://riot.im/experimental
    - frutiger 8y ago
      > I've been using computers for a quarter of a decade OT but I suppose you mean century?
- etatoby 8y ago
  Because: 1. WhatsApp was the first widely-used such app and it was phone number-based, so all the clones use the same system. 2. Non-technical people have a hard time (read: bordering on impossible) remembering their usernames, let alone passwords, and by using the phone number as both identification and authorization, the problem is sidestepped. 3. People have an existing address book of contacts (in the form of phone numbers) in their mobile phones, that can be used to pre-populate the app's buddy list.
  - davestephens 8y ago
    Re 2 - Blackberry Messenger used an eight character alphanumeric ID, and was enormously popular in the UK (not sure about other countries however) - until Blackberries died a death at the hands of Apple and Android...
    - MekaiGS 8y ago
      BBM was different since the PIN was baked into the device so it as more seamless than even using your phone number. The problem was when you change your device you can't migrate your PIN so I think it contributed to decline to usage as people moved to other BB devices or iOS/Android This only strengths the argument why majority of chat apps use phone number as your username.
    - matwood 8y ago
      Was BB ever really mainstream? I know it had loyal following, particularly for business users. But, at its peak it had 80M users globally. Most people still had basic phones then, and many of those with BlackBerries probably had an IT department supporting them.
      - DanBC 8y ago
        BB was thoroughly mainstream in the UK. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2011/aug/08/london-riots-facebook-twitter-blackberry https://www.theguardian.com/media/2011/aug/08/london-riots-f... from 2010 / 2011 > Using BlackBerry handsets – the smartphone of choice for the majority (37%) of British teens, according to last week's Ofcom study – BBM allows users to send one-to-many messages to their network of contacts, who are connected by "BBM PINs". For many teens armed with a BlackBerry, BBM has replaced text messaging because it is free, instant and more part of a much larger community than regular SMS.
- rzwitserloot 8y ago
  There were many messengers that ran on mobile phones in the old days (the days where text was pricey in many places on the world so you'd think people'd be extremely motivated to find an alternative to texting!) and none really caught on... until whatsapp appeared on the scene. The key innovation whatsapp brought, because the app was laughably insecure and probably overly simple (but that simplicity can't have been the reason it won; there were other really simple apps out there)... was making your account ID equal to your phone number. This gave whatsapp the ability to skip the phase of setting up your 'network'; there'd be no need to ask your friends what their ICQ id is or whatever. Whatsapp would even simply tell you which of your friends had whatsapp installed, immediately, without any consent or setting up your network required. THAT sold. That simplicity. Yeah, you can (rightfully!) put quite a few question marks on the consent and authentication mechanism I laid out above, but it does lead to an app that is useful and understandable for a great many people (even if it is also not particularly secure or careful about your consent). I'm sure all these messenger apps (signal, imessage, whatsapp, and telegram) know it and wouldn't dare walk away from phone numbers at this point.
  - baybal2 8y ago
    Believe me or not, there was a J2ME app called Talkonaut that was wildly popular in the middle east, and used phone number direct mapping back in days. There is no chance that Whatsapp never heard of it. I made few localisations for it back in my high school years. Syria was a very big market for it.
  - thefounder 8y ago
    Someone should simply fork signal and deploy an app without phone number, focused on privacy(i.e options to exchange keys in person without any user account or phone number)
    - pgeorgi 8y ago
      So you'd have the account setup flow but still on a single server only few can control. I'd prefer to see people go for a federated system (eg XMPP with OMEMO for E2E crypto) or work on truly decentralized ones (that one is hard, and blockchain is not a trivial solution ;-) ) rather than propose yet another system where somebody else can control who you can talk to (even if they can't see what you're talking about) as a replacement for the previous system with the very same properties, just ran by a different party.
- gsich 8y ago
  Because companies think that people are too stupid for exchanging usernames/handles. Obviously they are wrong.
- qrbLPHiKpiux 8y ago
  My answer, and some won't like it, but it's true... Metadata is surveillance.
- zuck9 8y ago
  Keybase is a great alternative for chats (no voice/video yet). It is VC backed, doesn't require a phone number, everything is end-to-end encrypted and has apps for all major platforms (iOS, Android, Windows/Mac).
  - matwood 8y ago
    Agreed. My friends and I who kept in touch through Hangouts (gchat or whatever it is called this week), have moved to Keybase. It works fine, although the desktop chat app occasionally crashes on macOS, and the iOS app is not optimized for anything larger than an iPhone screen.
  - dexterdog 8y ago
    Not to mention it has a great filesystem behind it with integrated git. I use it as my main document store to replace dropbox and I use it on most of my projects in place of slack.
tialaramex 8y ago
In Telegram if I can convince the phone network that I have your phone number, Telegram will deliver all your Telegram messages (including historical ones) to me and I can read them. This is completely transparent to the other participants. In Signal the remote Signal server will not deliver the messages, since anyway I can't decrypt them (there are no unencrypted messages in Signal) and it never keeps any that it has successfully delivered. Now, if I convince the network that I have your phone number, how should your friends determine that I'm not you? In Signal (and WhatsApp) this is designed into the UI. If you aren't sure if this is who you think it is, you can meet in person and compare numbers or QR codes to check there are no shenanigans going on. Many casual users never do this, but if something seems "off" you can verify. But in Telegram there's no option like that.
- dijit 8y ago
  >This is completely transparent to the other participants nitpick, but I think you mean 'opaque', as in, they can't see it.
- nithinm 8y ago
  In telegram also you can see an image and text derived from the secret key for comparison. Get your facts right.
  - tialaramex 8y ago
    Yeah this doesn't do the same thing at all. In Signal you have an identity that's verifiable, and that's what their verify step does. The keys constantly ratchet, and you can even both reset them from scratch, identity verification isn't affected. In Telegram you set up a separate encrypted chat and the secret keys for it can be visualised. But if you create a different chat any steps you took to verify the identity don't carry over.

Erlich_Bachman 8y ago

Why do all messengers keep requiring phone numbers? Is it because of the problem of spam? Couldn't this easily be prevented by for example requiring consent before sending messages to new contacts? You could for example have it work 2 ways: 1) require a phone number connected to message unknown contacts. 2) without phone number, requiring prior consent from any new unknown contact, to message them.

nebulous1 8y ago
Ease of use
unicornporn 8y ago
> Why do all messengers keep requiring phone numbers? Matrix/Riot.im and Wire doesn't. I think they're both good alternatives.
- ekianjo 8y ago
  Wire only if you register first on a computer. from the phone if you create an account you have to use your number.
  - walterbell 8y ago
    They seem to have changed this now, you can register with an email address from mobile. It still asks for a phone number, but you can say no.
    - ekianjo 8y ago
      That has probably changed recently indeed.
- theshrike79 8y ago
  Riot.im is a damn pain to set up. I've been using computers for a quarter of a decade and I still get flummoxed by the UX. Bridging Matrix/Riot to IRC/Telegram/Whatever seems to require some black magick beyond my capabilities. On the other hand, even my grandmother can (and has) set up Telegram and WhatsApp.
  - unicornporn 8y ago
    Have you had a look lately? Plenty has happened in the last year (not only on the UX front)! https://media.ccc.de/v/35c3-9400-matrix_the_current_status_and_year_to_date https://media.ccc.de/v/35c3-9400-matrix_the_current_status_a... http://riot.im/experimental http://riot.im/experimental
  - frutiger 8y ago
    > I've been using computers for a quarter of a decade OT but I suppose you mean century?
etatoby 8y ago
Because: 1. WhatsApp was the first widely-used such app and it was phone number-based, so all the clones use the same system. 2. Non-technical people have a hard time (read: bordering on impossible) remembering their usernames, let alone passwords, and by using the phone number as both identification and authorization, the problem is sidestepped. 3. People have an existing address book of contacts (in the form of phone numbers) in their mobile phones, that can be used to pre-populate the app's buddy list.
- davestephens 8y ago
  Re 2 - Blackberry Messenger used an eight character alphanumeric ID, and was enormously popular in the UK (not sure about other countries however) - until Blackberries died a death at the hands of Apple and Android...
  - MekaiGS 8y ago
    BBM was different since the PIN was baked into the device so it as more seamless than even using your phone number. The problem was when you change your device you can't migrate your PIN so I think it contributed to decline to usage as people moved to other BB devices or iOS/Android This only strengths the argument why majority of chat apps use phone number as your username.
  - matwood 8y ago
    Was BB ever really mainstream? I know it had loyal following, particularly for business users. But, at its peak it had 80M users globally. Most people still had basic phones then, and many of those with BlackBerries probably had an IT department supporting them.
    - DanBC 8y ago
      BB was thoroughly mainstream in the UK. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2011/aug/08/london-riots-facebook-twitter-blackberry https://www.theguardian.com/media/2011/aug/08/london-riots-f... from 2010 / 2011 > Using BlackBerry handsets – the smartphone of choice for the majority (37%) of British teens, according to last week's Ofcom study – BBM allows users to send one-to-many messages to their network of contacts, who are connected by "BBM PINs". For many teens armed with a BlackBerry, BBM has replaced text messaging because it is free, instant and more part of a much larger community than regular SMS.
rzwitserloot 8y ago
There were many messengers that ran on mobile phones in the old days (the days where text was pricey in many places on the world so you'd think people'd be extremely motivated to find an alternative to texting!) and none really caught on... until whatsapp appeared on the scene. The key innovation whatsapp brought, because the app was laughably insecure and probably overly simple (but that simplicity can't have been the reason it won; there were other really simple apps out there)... was making your account ID equal to your phone number. This gave whatsapp the ability to skip the phase of setting up your 'network'; there'd be no need to ask your friends what their ICQ id is or whatever. Whatsapp would even simply tell you which of your friends had whatsapp installed, immediately, without any consent or setting up your network required. THAT sold. That simplicity. Yeah, you can (rightfully!) put quite a few question marks on the consent and authentication mechanism I laid out above, but it does lead to an app that is useful and understandable for a great many people (even if it is also not particularly secure or careful about your consent). I'm sure all these messenger apps (signal, imessage, whatsapp, and telegram) know it and wouldn't dare walk away from phone numbers at this point.
- baybal2 8y ago
  Believe me or not, there was a J2ME app called Talkonaut that was wildly popular in the middle east, and used phone number direct mapping back in days. There is no chance that Whatsapp never heard of it. I made few localisations for it back in my high school years. Syria was a very big market for it.
- thefounder 8y ago
  Someone should simply fork signal and deploy an app without phone number, focused on privacy(i.e options to exchange keys in person without any user account or phone number)
  - pgeorgi 8y ago
    So you'd have the account setup flow but still on a single server only few can control. I'd prefer to see people go for a federated system (eg XMPP with OMEMO for E2E crypto) or work on truly decentralized ones (that one is hard, and blockchain is not a trivial solution ;-) ) rather than propose yet another system where somebody else can control who you can talk to (even if they can't see what you're talking about) as a replacement for the previous system with the very same properties, just ran by a different party.
gsich 8y ago
Because companies think that people are too stupid for exchanging usernames/handles. Obviously they are wrong.
qrbLPHiKpiux 8y ago
My answer, and some won't like it, but it's true... Metadata is surveillance.
zuck9 8y ago
Keybase is a great alternative for chats (no voice/video yet). It is VC backed, doesn't require a phone number, everything is end-to-end encrypted and has apps for all major platforms (iOS, Android, Windows/Mac).
- matwood 8y ago
  Agreed. My friends and I who kept in touch through Hangouts (gchat or whatever it is called this week), have moved to Keybase. It works fine, although the desktop chat app occasionally crashes on macOS, and the iOS app is not optimized for anything larger than an iPhone screen.
- dexterdog 8y ago
  Not to mention it has a great filesystem behind it with integrated git. I use it as my main document store to replace dropbox and I use it on most of my projects in place of slack.

tialaramex 8y ago

In Telegram if I can convince the phone network that I have your phone number, Telegram will deliver all your Telegram messages (including historical ones) to me and I can read them. This is completely transparent to the other participants. In Signal the remote Signal server will not deliver the messages, since anyway I can't decrypt them (there are no unencrypted messages in Signal) and it never keeps any that it has successfully delivered. Now, if I convince the network that I have your phone number, how should your friends determine that I'm not you? In Signal (and WhatsApp) this is designed into the UI. If you aren't sure if this is who you think it is, you can meet in person and compare numbers or QR codes to check there are no shenanigans going on. Many casual users never do this, but if something seems "off" you can verify. But in Telegram there's no option like that.

dijit 8y ago
>This is completely transparent to the other participants nitpick, but I think you mean 'opaque', as in, they can't see it.
nithinm 8y ago
In telegram also you can see an image and text derived from the secret key for comparison. Get your facts right.
- tialaramex 8y ago
  Yeah this doesn't do the same thing at all. In Signal you have an identity that's verifiable, and that's what their verify step does. The keys constantly ratchet, and you can even both reset them from scratch, identity verification isn't affected. In Telegram you set up a separate encrypted chat and the secret keys for it can be visualised. But if you create a different chat any steps you took to verify the identity don't carry over.