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> Say what you want about their security; they have the absolute best UX of any (primarily 1-on-1) messaging app, bar none. That is precisely because they don'

> Say what you want about their security; they have the absolute best UX of any (primarily 1-on-1) messaging app, bar none. That is precisely because they don't give a shit about security. While others like Whatsapp bother with e2ee and resulting device sync problems and inability to do server-side search, Telegram just stores everything on a server without (meaningful) encryption and boldly claims that 'it is the most secure messenger'. And, imagine that, users just believe that it is the most secure! (I did talk to MANY people who repeated this word for word, 'Telegram is the most secure and encrypted messenger app!', and yes, nobody of them used Secret chats, - it doesn't nicely sync, and nobody needs disappearing messages anyway.

philliphaydon 4y ago
WhatsApp is not e2ee. When Facebook displays advertising based on conversations in what’s app. You will never convince me it’s e2ee. It’s fake privacy.
- paulryanrogers 4y ago
  WA was E2EE, at least at one point. Its key weakness was not notifying of key changes by default.
  - philliphaydon 4y ago
    Before being bought by Facebook I would believe it was e2ee. But believe it’s not e2ee between the client and Facebook. They just decrypt analysis and reencypt and forward. Since communication is not peer to peer and goes via FB the key exchange is prob with Facebook not the users.
    - gruez 4y ago
      >They just decrypt analysis and reencypt and forward. Since communication is not peer to peer and goes via FB the key exchange is prob with Facebook not the users. Do you have any evidence for this, or is this your "better safe than sorry" assumption for every e2e messenger that doesn't allow you to verify keys?
      - philliphaydon 4y ago
        After FB bought WhatsApp I’ve had multiple occasions where shortly after having conversations with people about products I haven’t searched for. The only place I’ve discussed it. Is in a whats app conversation. I got advertising in Facebook for those products. For example when looking for an apartment I told my agent (non business account) that I wanted safety catches on the windows. I immediately got advertising for safety catches and window gates. I don’t own cats but in a conversation with a friend who owns cats I said she should get one of those cat tree things and scratch poles. Right away Facebook starts showing me adverts for cat toys. This is not stuff I’ve searched or googled or anything. Just mentioned in WhatsApp. Maybe WhatsApp whats differently in America but in Singapore I get advertising in Facebook from conversations.
        scrollaway 4y ago
        None of this is evidence of decryption. At best it’s circumstantial anecdotes pointing to Facebook extracting topic metadata out of your convos. This can be done clientside, no decryption necessary. (And it’s easy to prove that it’s being done if that’s the case)
        klyrs 4y ago
        E2EE plus arbitrarily invasive clent-side sniffing/reporting should not be considered "E2EE" by any means. Even if reports to the mothership are strongly encrypted (at which point it becomes harder to determine what's in the reports).
        scrollaway 4y ago
        I agree with you, but the claim that Facebook is decrypting and reencrypting things is a very very very severe one.
        klyrs 4y ago
        I didn't claim they are. But they can. And without transparency, I have very little inclination to trust. I find it plausible that they'd scan for keywords and phone home when they get hits -- advertising businesses are not known for their scruples and fb has not distinguished itself in that regard. Once that machinery is in place, it's ripe for abuse. I don't claim any proof it's happening, but it would be naive to blindly trust that it isn't.
izacus 4y ago
Pretty much none of the features mentioned here have anything to do with E2EE security. How did you even try to get to such conclusion (besides really really trying to use it as a segway into your encryption rant)?!
- Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago
  I'm actually very opposing this e2ee everywhere crowd, because we're developing an XMPP app and we're annoyed to death by people who demanding us (ordering even!) to deliver them encryption above anything else and always asking this as a first question. The comment was more related to a puzzling observation that a really serious promise of security makes people more happy than actual security. Why bother with providing safety to people if all they need is to feel safe?
  - Judgmentality 4y ago
    > The comment was more related to a puzzling observation that a really serious promise of security makes people more happy than actual security. Why bother with providing safety to people if all they need is to feel safe? It's called security theater. The TSA is my favorite example of this phenomenon.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
scrollaway 4y ago
There’s probably a lesson to be learned here. People care about these features. Tell you what: I care about these features! And I also care about e2ee but I care more about all the things I can’t do with e2ee enabled. When it matters, I enable secret chats. In the early weeks of the war I used secret chats a ton to organise things (and I echo your observation that most people don’t know about them). But it doesn’t matter all the time. Messenger also has e2ee secret chats; they’re awful and don’t have 1/10th the features telegram’s chats have. Hell even telegram’s secret chats are more featureful than WhatsApp chats (which are all e2ee)
- nyanpasu64 4y ago
  I can't use secret chats because they're only available on mobile, possibly macOS (and Unigram if you use Windows 10), not Windows or Linux, and I like accessing my chats across devices and typing on a physical keyboard.
  - scrollaway 4y ago
    Secret chats are available on Linux, they’re just not accessible across devices. You’re finding out about the issues with e2ee.
  - rawbot 4y ago
    There's now a desktop application for Whatsapp (at least on Windows). It claims to support ee2e, and the sync is instant.
- andrepd 4y ago
  I care more that my intimate chats and pictures aren't stored plaintext in corporate and government servers for them to do god knows what than I care about some (cue soyjak face) heckin' stickerinos. But to each his own.
  - scrollaway 4y ago
    Yeah same, that’s why I have my intimate chats in a secret chat and not a regular one. I don’t know why this is so hard to understand. With telegram, you have both.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
upofadown 4y ago
>...and yes, nobody of them used Secret chats... Pretty much no one does any sort of identity verification anyway on any E2EE messaging system. So that means that the people running the servers can MITM if they feel like it to get the content. So in practice Telegram might be the best of something or another for all it matters. It's sort of a con. Yes our E2EE encryption app is perfectly secure assuming you do this thing that we know you won't bother with and will not be able to figure out anyway. Study based on Signal, but applicable to pretty much all of them: * https://www.ndss-symposium.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/09-when-signal-hits-the-fan-on-the-usability-and-security-of-state-of-the-art-secure-mobile-messaging.pdf https://www.ndss-symposium.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/09...
- lxgr 4y ago
  > Pretty much no one does any sort of identity verification anyway on any E2EE messaging system. So that means that the people running the servers can MITM if they feel like it to get the content. The fact that anybody can verify keys raises the stakes of attempting a MITM attack significantly and thus protects the majority that doesn't verify keys themselves.
  - upofadown 4y ago
    Sure it is a good feature to have, but this sort of attack is going to be targeted. You don't do it to everyone. In the unlikely event you do get caught then you can act dumb in almost all cases. Blame Pegasus or whatever...
    - lxgr 4y ago
      I have no illusions about being able to keep a nation state attacker off my devices, but not having all of my correspondence shared with all kinds of third parties by default sure feels nice.
      - vinay_ys 4y ago
        Don't forget anonymity with temporary/throwaway devices and handles combined with E2EE PFS protocols can be very powerful to thwart such surveillance.
_def 4y ago
> That is precisely because they don't give a shit about security Well, it's not like other messengers excelled at UX before they introduced e2ee (which is not implemented very well either)
benreesman 4y ago
Telegram is not a tool for sensitive communications, there are far better options if you don't trust some company or have serious adversaries (Signal comes to mind). But it does aggressively surface the P2P AES256 text chat feature, it does P2P AES256 encrypt voice and video by default (unless I'm badly mistaken), it's got the cute emoji key-verification affordance in voice and video, it does aggressively surface features for allowing people to contact you or not, which is the exact opposite of what a "growth-hacker" PM would do. How it stands up to a serious security audit is beyond my pay-grade, Moxie seems to think it's weak-ish, and again, that makes it a bad choice if you have credible adversaries. But I've worked in privacy-hostile settings. Telegram is not privacy-hostile.
- 0x49d1 4y ago
  Still seems like a good thing. I can use the same app with the same contacts for e2e chats too. Also the calls are e2e encrypted. For now: Telegram is fast with good UX, many contacts, works just fine and is reasonably secure (with their own "credo"). The mentioned above WhatsApp is a closed source client program that can do whatever it wants on your phone, who said that it is not secretly sending any word you type to some telemetry address, while e2e encrypting your chat traffic...
d0mine 4y ago
I see this opinion often on HN but it is BS. If I were a dissident then given the choice between whatsapp and telegram, telegram wins "Secret chats use end-to-end encryption, thanks to which we don't have any data to disclose. To protect the data that is not covered by end-to-end encryption, Telegram uses a distributed infrastructure. Cloud chat data is stored in multiple data centers around the globe that are controlled by different legal entities spread across different jurisdictions. The relevant decryption keys are split into parts and are never kept in the same place as the data they protect. As a result, several court orders from different jurisdictions are required to force us to give up any data." https://telegram.org/faq#q-do-you-process-data-requests https://telegram.org/faq#q-do-you-process-data-requests Telegram is more convenient by default and it can provide security for those who need it.
- acchow 4y ago
  Btw, only 1:1 chats can be used for Secret Chats in Telegram. It does not support group chats.
- Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago
  You must have missed all the very suspicious information about Durov's close ties with Russian authorities, and that Telegram developers worked from the same office with VK in Saint-Petersburg when he claimed that they are in Germany. [1] Good choice for a dissident! (No) [1]: https://medium.com/@anton.rozenberg/friendship-betrayal-claims-3f395bcc95fa https://medium.com/@anton.rozenberg/friendship-betrayal-clai...
  - kgeist 4y ago
    I quickly skimmed through the article (it's pretty long) and its main gist is that the author had a conflict with Pavel Durov's brother about his girlfriend, can you elaborate why you think Durov has ties to authorities? I don't see why working in St.Petersburg makes you a Putin ally.
    - qwerty456127 4y ago
KennyBlanken 4y ago
The most secure messenger...that just so happens to be developed by a Russian company headquartered in the same building as VK, a known Kremlin-controlled social media network! https://theoutline.com/post/2348/what-isn-t-telegram-saying-about-its-connections-to-the-kremlin https://theoutline.com/post/2348/what-isn-t-telegram-saying-...
- cies 4y ago
  > developed by a Russian company Yeah. And WhatsApp/FB/MSNMessenger/GChat by US companies. Both are detrimental for your privacy.
cies 4y ago
e2ee in whatsapp is a joke. e2ee with close source clients, closed protocol, backup functions, sorry... that's not real e2ee, that's a marketing ploy. signal does marginally better. real e2ee is possible with XMPP and Omemo iirc. but as others have pointed out that's not UXy enough to compete with Telegram for the mainsteam.
alexiaya 4y ago
While it may not be the most secure, for many casual users the level of encryption provided in cloud chats is good enough for the convenience of smooth cloud sync, which generally doesn't work with E2E messengers and I frequently lose messages when I restore my phone or get a new one. At least they say the encryption keys for cloud chats are scattered across multiple jurdistictions so they wouldn't be able to hand over anything (other than public chats) unless someone got a court order in bunch of different countries at the same time. I would definitely trust them more than WhatsApp even though the latter uses the Signal protocol, but I don't trust Meta to not collect metadata or possibly have other backdoors as well.
- tcfhgj 4y ago
  > smooth cloud sync, which generally doesn't work with E2E messengers Wrong, see Element or Matrix generally
  - kaba0 4y ago
    Smooth is not the word I would use for them. Though it may very well be only a “frontend” problem and the underlying tech/theory is probably good. But the current implementations are not yet there unfortunately.
tcfhgj 4y ago
Server side search is possible with E2EE: https://matrix-org.github.io/gsoc/#/projects?project=implement_encrypted_search_for_matrix&lang=en https://matrix-org.github.io/gsoc/#/projects?project=impleme...

philliphaydon 4y ago

WhatsApp is not e2ee. When Facebook displays advertising based on conversations in what’s app. You will never convince me it’s e2ee. It’s fake privacy.

paulryanrogers 4y ago
WA was E2EE, at least at one point. Its key weakness was not notifying of key changes by default.
- philliphaydon 4y ago
  Before being bought by Facebook I would believe it was e2ee. But believe it’s not e2ee between the client and Facebook. They just decrypt analysis and reencypt and forward. Since communication is not peer to peer and goes via FB the key exchange is prob with Facebook not the users.
  - gruez 4y ago
    >They just decrypt analysis and reencypt and forward. Since communication is not peer to peer and goes via FB the key exchange is prob with Facebook not the users. Do you have any evidence for this, or is this your "better safe than sorry" assumption for every e2e messenger that doesn't allow you to verify keys?
    - philliphaydon 4y ago
      After FB bought WhatsApp I’ve had multiple occasions where shortly after having conversations with people about products I haven’t searched for. The only place I’ve discussed it. Is in a whats app conversation. I got advertising in Facebook for those products. For example when looking for an apartment I told my agent (non business account) that I wanted safety catches on the windows. I immediately got advertising for safety catches and window gates. I don’t own cats but in a conversation with a friend who owns cats I said she should get one of those cat tree things and scratch poles. Right away Facebook starts showing me adverts for cat toys. This is not stuff I’ve searched or googled or anything. Just mentioned in WhatsApp. Maybe WhatsApp whats differently in America but in Singapore I get advertising in Facebook from conversations.
      - scrollaway 4y ago
        None of this is evidence of decryption. At best it’s circumstantial anecdotes pointing to Facebook extracting topic metadata out of your convos. This can be done clientside, no decryption necessary. (And it’s easy to prove that it’s being done if that’s the case)
        klyrs 4y ago
        E2EE plus arbitrarily invasive clent-side sniffing/reporting should not be considered "E2EE" by any means. Even if reports to the mothership are strongly encrypted (at which point it becomes harder to determine what's in the reports).
        scrollaway 4y ago
        I agree with you, but the claim that Facebook is decrypting and reencrypting things is a very very very severe one.
        klyrs 4y ago
        I didn't claim they are. But they can. And without transparency, I have very little inclination to trust. I find it plausible that they'd scan for keywords and phone home when they get hits -- advertising businesses are not known for their scruples and fb has not distinguished itself in that regard. Once that machinery is in place, it's ripe for abuse. I don't claim any proof it's happening, but it would be naive to blindly trust that it isn't.

izacus 4y ago

Pretty much none of the features mentioned here have anything to do with E2EE security. How did you even try to get to such conclusion (besides really really trying to use it as a segway into your encryption rant)?!

Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago
I'm actually very opposing this e2ee everywhere crowd, because we're developing an XMPP app and we're annoyed to death by people who demanding us (ordering even!) to deliver them encryption above anything else and always asking this as a first question. The comment was more related to a puzzling observation that a really serious promise of security makes people more happy than actual security. Why bother with providing safety to people if all they need is to feel safe?
- Judgmentality 4y ago
  > The comment was more related to a puzzling observation that a really serious promise of security makes people more happy than actual security. Why bother with providing safety to people if all they need is to feel safe? It's called security theater. The TSA is my favorite example of this phenomenon.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

scrollaway 4y ago

There’s probably a lesson to be learned here. People care about these features. Tell you what: I care about these features! And I also care about e2ee but I care more about all the things I can’t do with e2ee enabled. When it matters, I enable secret chats. In the early weeks of the war I used secret chats a ton to organise things (and I echo your observation that most people don’t know about them). But it doesn’t matter all the time. Messenger also has e2ee secret chats; they’re awful and don’t have 1/10th the features telegram’s chats have. Hell even telegram’s secret chats are more featureful than WhatsApp chats (which are all e2ee)

nyanpasu64 4y ago
I can't use secret chats because they're only available on mobile, possibly macOS (and Unigram if you use Windows 10), not Windows or Linux, and I like accessing my chats across devices and typing on a physical keyboard.
- scrollaway 4y ago
  Secret chats are available on Linux, they’re just not accessible across devices. You’re finding out about the issues with e2ee.
- rawbot 4y ago
  There's now a desktop application for Whatsapp (at least on Windows). It claims to support ee2e, and the sync is instant.
andrepd 4y ago
I care more that my intimate chats and pictures aren't stored plaintext in corporate and government servers for them to do god knows what than I care about some (cue soyjak face) heckin' stickerinos. But to each his own.
- scrollaway 4y ago
  Yeah same, that’s why I have my intimate chats in a secret chat and not a regular one. I don’t know why this is so hard to understand. With telegram, you have both.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

upofadown 4y ago

>...and yes, nobody of them used Secret chats... Pretty much no one does any sort of identity verification anyway on any E2EE messaging system. So that means that the people running the servers can MITM if they feel like it to get the content. So in practice Telegram might be the best of something or another for all it matters. It's sort of a con. Yes our E2EE encryption app is perfectly secure assuming you do this thing that we know you won't bother with and will not be able to figure out anyway. Study based on Signal, but applicable to pretty much all of them: * https://www.ndss-symposium.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/09-when-signal-hits-the-fan-on-the-usability-and-security-of-state-of-the-art-secure-mobile-messaging.pdf https://www.ndss-symposium.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/09...

lxgr 4y ago
> Pretty much no one does any sort of identity verification anyway on any E2EE messaging system. So that means that the people running the servers can MITM if they feel like it to get the content. The fact that anybody can verify keys raises the stakes of attempting a MITM attack significantly and thus protects the majority that doesn't verify keys themselves.
- upofadown 4y ago
  Sure it is a good feature to have, but this sort of attack is going to be targeted. You don't do it to everyone. In the unlikely event you do get caught then you can act dumb in almost all cases. Blame Pegasus or whatever...
  - lxgr 4y ago
    I have no illusions about being able to keep a nation state attacker off my devices, but not having all of my correspondence shared with all kinds of third parties by default sure feels nice.
    - vinay_ys 4y ago
      Don't forget anonymity with temporary/throwaway devices and handles combined with E2EE PFS protocols can be very powerful to thwart such surveillance.

_def 4y ago

> That is precisely because they don't give a shit about security Well, it's not like other messengers excelled at UX before they introduced e2ee (which is not implemented very well either)

benreesman 4y ago

Telegram is not a tool for sensitive communications, there are far better options if you don't trust some company or have serious adversaries (Signal comes to mind). But it does aggressively surface the P2P AES256 text chat feature, it does P2P AES256 encrypt voice and video by default (unless I'm badly mistaken), it's got the cute emoji key-verification affordance in voice and video, it does aggressively surface features for allowing people to contact you or not, which is the exact opposite of what a "growth-hacker" PM would do. How it stands up to a serious security audit is beyond my pay-grade, Moxie seems to think it's weak-ish, and again, that makes it a bad choice if you have credible adversaries. But I've worked in privacy-hostile settings. Telegram is not privacy-hostile.

0x49d1 4y ago
Still seems like a good thing. I can use the same app with the same contacts for e2e chats too. Also the calls are e2e encrypted. For now: Telegram is fast with good UX, many contacts, works just fine and is reasonably secure (with their own "credo"). The mentioned above WhatsApp is a closed source client program that can do whatever it wants on your phone, who said that it is not secretly sending any word you type to some telemetry address, while e2e encrypting your chat traffic...

d0mine 4y ago

I see this opinion often on HN but it is BS. If I were a dissident then given the choice between whatsapp and telegram, telegram wins "Secret chats use end-to-end encryption, thanks to which we don't have any data to disclose. To protect the data that is not covered by end-to-end encryption, Telegram uses a distributed infrastructure. Cloud chat data is stored in multiple data centers around the globe that are controlled by different legal entities spread across different jurisdictions. The relevant decryption keys are split into parts and are never kept in the same place as the data they protect. As a result, several court orders from different jurisdictions are required to force us to give up any data." https://telegram.org/faq#q-do-you-process-data-requests https://telegram.org/faq#q-do-you-process-data-requests Telegram is more convenient by default and it can provide security for those who need it.

acchow 4y ago
Btw, only 1:1 chats can be used for Secret Chats in Telegram. It does not support group chats.
Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago
You must have missed all the very suspicious information about Durov's close ties with Russian authorities, and that Telegram developers worked from the same office with VK in Saint-Petersburg when he claimed that they are in Germany. [1] Good choice for a dissident! (No) [1]: https://medium.com/@anton.rozenberg/friendship-betrayal-claims-3f395bcc95fa https://medium.com/@anton.rozenberg/friendship-betrayal-clai...
- kgeist 4y ago
  I quickly skimmed through the article (it's pretty long) and its main gist is that the author had a conflict with Pavel Durov's brother about his girlfriend, can you elaborate why you think Durov has ties to authorities? I don't see why working in St.Petersburg makes you a Putin ally.
  - qwerty456127 4y ago

KennyBlanken 4y ago

The most secure messenger...that just so happens to be developed by a Russian company headquartered in the same building as VK, a known Kremlin-controlled social media network! https://theoutline.com/post/2348/what-isn-t-telegram-saying-about-its-connections-to-the-kremlin https://theoutline.com/post/2348/what-isn-t-telegram-saying-...

cies 4y ago
> developed by a Russian company Yeah. And WhatsApp/FB/MSNMessenger/GChat by US companies. Both are detrimental for your privacy.

cies 4y ago

e2ee in whatsapp is a joke. e2ee with close source clients, closed protocol, backup functions, sorry... that's not real e2ee, that's a marketing ploy. signal does marginally better. real e2ee is possible with XMPP and Omemo iirc. but as others have pointed out that's not UXy enough to compete with Telegram for the mainsteam.

alexiaya 4y ago

While it may not be the most secure, for many casual users the level of encryption provided in cloud chats is good enough for the convenience of smooth cloud sync, which generally doesn't work with E2E messengers and I frequently lose messages when I restore my phone or get a new one. At least they say the encryption keys for cloud chats are scattered across multiple jurdistictions so they wouldn't be able to hand over anything (other than public chats) unless someone got a court order in bunch of different countries at the same time. I would definitely trust them more than WhatsApp even though the latter uses the Signal protocol, but I don't trust Meta to not collect metadata or possibly have other backdoors as well.

tcfhgj 4y ago
> smooth cloud sync, which generally doesn't work with E2E messengers Wrong, see Element or Matrix generally
- kaba0 4y ago
  Smooth is not the word I would use for them. Though it may very well be only a “frontend” problem and the underlying tech/theory is probably good. But the current implementations are not yet there unfortunately.

tcfhgj 4y ago

Server side search is possible with E2EE: https://matrix-org.github.io/gsoc/#/projects?project=implement_encrypted_search_for_matrix&lang=en https://matrix-org.github.io/gsoc/#/projects?project=impleme...