[moxie]

Marginal improvement in what sense? When considering privacy, Telegram is by far the worst option. They store the plaintext message history on the server of every message that every user has ever sent or received.

Even if WhatsApp weren't using end to end encryption by default, they would have no way of complying with government requests like this one, because they simply don't have the messages. Telegram, on the other hand, is a surveillance dream.

[etiam]

Only in the limited sense that Telegram appears to at least have an intention of really providing private messaging and one might hope that they one day drop the delusions of grandeur and start to take seriously constructive criticism about how to do it right, as you and others have presented in other threads here.

My understanding of the Whatsapp end-to-end-encryption is that the use of the term is completely misleading, as the "ends" they are referring to are the client and the Whatsapp server (https://www.whatsapp.com/faq/en/general/21864047). Unless you know otherwise, I take that to mean the communications are in the clear at Facebook, and in my estimation that's tantamount to piping them straight into the US surveillance machinery through whatever they call PRISM these days, or some more or less distant relative of it. (This arrangement would still offer protection from bad actors that don't have some form of easy access to Facebook's internal information).

Both seem like dreadful options in absolute terms, but if we're comparing I'd slightly rather have that user base in the hands of someone possibly sincere and incompetent than with someone competent but almost certainly treacherous. At least there is a sliver of hope for improvement and, who knows, maybe once they're off the paved road of Whatsapp they'll wobble their way though other alternatives to something like Signal eventually.

Since we're fortunate enough to have you here anyway, would you mind commenting on how Signal would fare under a similar blockade? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10750898

Would the service be taken down? Do you consider it a priority to try making it difficult to block in the default configuration?

[moxie]

It's actually the exact opposite. Telegram has made design decisions that prevent them from ever being able to provide private messaging by default without radically altering their design and re-writing all of their clients. The Telegram "client" is really the server -- everything happens there, and the client you use is just a view onto the server.

[etiam]

Thank you for pointing that out.

That structure seems enlightening to understanding how Telegram has been able to create clients for so many operating systems in a relatively short time.