I'm well aware of that and I don't have WhatsApp because of its privacy problems (much to the annoyance of some family members, but I imagine it saved me from a

I'm well aware of that and I don't have WhatsApp because of its privacy problems (much to the annoyance of some family members, but I imagine it saved me from a lot of printer queries, and if they aren't willing to switch then why should I). What I think you're underappreciating is that Telegram was built on the premise of privacy and they've neglected that from day one. It was better than the status quo on day one (at release), but have fallen further and further behind ever since. Telegram was launched when Whatsapp sent messages without transport encryption over port 443 (this was fun on public wifi!) and got big when Whatsapp was bought by Facebook because Telegram was independent and had proper end to end encryption (with air quotes around "proper" if you like; it wasn't OTR-grade but at least it was better than the status quo). Since then, nothing happened whatsoever on the privacy front. Even the legal compliance is a complete joke (gdpr data exports only work in a few clients and not very well at that), but more importantly to me, they need gdpr data exports because the servers still know everything. Whatsapp moved on, Signal got a lot more mature, Wire has also come onto the playing field, and Telegram has done nothing since before Snowden told us to turn on https basically.