Telegram is indistinguishable from an FSB honeypot
Telegram is indistinguishable from an FSB honeypot
Many people who focus on information security, including myself, have long considered Telegram suspicious and untrustworthy. Now, based on findings published by the investigative journalism outlet ISt
Telegram is very successful in getting people off Meta's ecosystem. It has open source clients and very good Linux support.
This is why western media is obsessed with Telegram and spend a lot of time smearing it.
Telegram literally stores all your messages, metadata, etc. in plain text on their servers. This means that it provides considerably worse security than even proprietary messengers, such as WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. Telegram has an option for encrypted chats, but it's not available for groups, lacks support for voice and video calls, and Telegram deliberately goes out of their way to make the experience of using encrypted chats as painful as possible.
You're even better off using WhatsApp, but if you actually want a good messenger, switch to Signal. It's free and open source (both the clients and the backend server), developed by a nonprofit organization, and it's basically the gold standard for encrypted communications.
For every smart educate person it is obvious that Telegram is honeypot created by Russian-Dubai oligarch
The two decisions Telegram made (choice of infrastructure provider who happens to cooperate with the Russian FSB, and attaching a cleartext device identifier to encrypted messages) taken together reinforce surveillance capability of the FSB considerably more strongly than either of these decisions would have on its own.