[input_sh]

But I don't want my entire history to be available on a website? Who would even want that, what's the use case? Who looks at their months or years old messages?

If my message is over two weeks old, I'd prefer it not to be on anyone's server. I can keep a local backup if I wish to do so.

[emptysongglass]

Then you're not a person who values their message history. That's OK, you do you but there's many users out there, myself included who deeply value a searchable index of their chats from all time. I use it as a Memex or outboard brain I can tag and search. It's been in invaluable to digging up old quotes, pics, links, ebooks, etc. I wanted to re-surface either to share to someone else than the original recipient or for my own reference. Because you can search by broad types, it's doubly easy to find that archived data.

[maqp]

The problem isn't the message log itself, it's the fact you pay for the privilege of having the cloud backup of conversation history, by giving that history to Telegram as a company.

It doesn't have to be this way, as WA's planned feature of client-side encrypted cloud backups[1] shows, disproving Durov's implied claim that Telegram must have access to messages to provide such feature.

[1] https://engineering.fb.com/2021/09/10/security/whatsapp-e2ee...