Moxie Marlinspike, founder of Signal, a messaging platform that became popular for ensuring great privacy for its users said on Twitter It surprises him that many media continue to speak of Telegram as an “encrypted messaging” tool. Note that although Telegram offers many attractive features, “there is no worse option when it comes to privacy and data collection”Marlinspike said.
The rivalry between these apps is latent and historical. More since at the beginning of this year WhatsApp announced changes in its conditions of use (which it ended up implementing in May), which produced so much distrust in users that it led to a massive migration to two messaging apps known to be more secure: precisely Telegram and Signal.
It’s amazing to me that after all this time, almost all media coverage of Telegram still refers to it as an “encrypted messenger.”
Telegram has a lot of compelling features, but in terms of privacy and data collection, there is no worse choice. Here’s how it actually works:
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– Moxie Marlinspike (@moxie) December 23, 2021
With this panorama, it is clear that both companies are not going to praise each other, since they are rivals of a market that will continue to grow as users think more about the privacy of their data, but we will see what arguments Marlinspike provides for its accusations against Telegram.
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Arguments of the leader of Signal against his rival
According to Marlinspike, Telegram always stores on its servers all the contacts, groups, media and each of the messages sent by a user in unencrypted plaintext. As a result, Telegram’s smartphone app is just a “window” to see the servers where the data is actually stored. Therefore, everything that the user sees is also visible to Telegram operators.
To understand it better, the CEO tells you to delete Telegram and then install it on a brand new phone and register with your number. You will immediately see all your conversation history, all your contacts, all the media you have shared, all your groups. How? It was all on their servers, in plain text. That happens the same when you do this process with WhatsApp, if you have a backup saved.
According to him, the confusion comes from Telegram does allow creating “secret chats” that nominally do use end-to-end encryption, “although the security of the e2ee protocol they use is questionable,” says the leader of Signal.
To top these accusations, Marlinspike to another of the communication applications to compare. “Even Facebook Messenger is better for relatively secure communication because Meta at least uses better E2EE (end-to-end encryption) protocol and offers more features in encrypted mode. However, hardly anyone perceives Facebook Messenger as “safe.” In the end, Facebook Messenger and Telegram are almost the same. “
The founder of Signal says that the main problem he encounters when talking about privacy lies in a misunderstanding of what a private service is. “The true technology of privacy it is not about trusting someone else who handles your data“, but that those third parties do not have our data.” A message you send should only be visible to you and the recipient. The data of a group should only be visible to the other members.
The leaked FBI document
At the beginning of this month of December a document was leaked that showed all the data that the FBI can obtain from us through WhatsApp, Telegram and others.
It was known so Signal only provides data such as the date and time the user registers and it connects because it does not save other information. For its part, Telegram – as it already warns in its privacy policy – can reveal the IP and telephone number of a user if he is being investigated for terrorist crimes (something that, according to the same document, “until now, this has never happened “).
In the case of WhatsApp, although the complete content of the messages is never made available to the agents, the owner company (Facebook / Meta) does provide near real-time user data and their activities through metadata, as well as on their contacts and their communication record.
The battle between messaging applications that he starred in in 2021, has opened a new chapter that points to 2022 with more interesting stories to tell about it.