[matthewdgreen]

When Telegram first launched this was exactly my hypothesis. They found some mathematicians and (to paraphrase Bruce Schneier) they immediately tried to re-invent cryptography -- badly. Which is fine.

I assumed that after a few years and some success, Telegram would get more serious about this and replace its crypto with something better (maybe Signal protocol) in the same way that WhatsApp did. I also thought they'd eventually back up their privacy claims by deploying default end-to-end encryption for non-broadcast chats. After all that's the trend everywhere: even Facebook Messenger is now encrypted! But Telegram never, ever did this. They kept on making loud claims to be a privacy-preserving messenger, but they never added real privacy.

[sambazi]

not being controlled by a nato-country might be a relevant security feature for some ppl