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by nemomarx 322 days ago
I think the post office screening letters to be sure terrorists aren't sending them would also be pretty bad
3 comments

It would. Maybe my analogy was flawed.

My point (which I probably explained badly) was that telegram ignores all abuse reports. As a company operating in the first world you can't really do that legally.

You probably don't want to die on the hill of defending telegram. If they really cared about privacy, they would push everything to e2e. Instead they absolutely know what people talk about. Even if they're 100% pure hearted and really never take a peek, three letter agencies from all over the world are probably less honorable.

While the post office didn't screen all letters, it was possible to get a warrant to read all the mail going to a certain address, and police often did that.
The UK recently introduced machine readable codes on postage stamps so they can now collect metadata on letters.