[soblemprolver]

The article opens with a statement by Telegram co-founder Pavel Durov who claims that WhatsApp shared Messages with third parties while Telegram "never did and never will" do that.

Now, Telegram doesn't use End-to-End encryption by default at all, does it? What I mean is: The message is encrypted on the sender's device and can only be decrypted on that and the receiver's device.

Telegram uses transport layer encryption that leaves all messages exposed to the servers an their admins. Last I checked, there was a E2E feature but every room I opened would just stop working after a while and my contacts were very confused about that. Large rooms weren't possible.

I have no idea what Meta/WhatsApp may or may not be doing but this article opens with Telegram and doesn't pick that up anymore. Makes it feel like a telegram ad.

The rest of the article may be fine but it's very lengthy and goes somewhere to show that dispite using the Signal protocol, WhatsApp cloud backups can be decrypted, I think. The Telegram ad was too irritating to give the article a fair chance, to be honest.

XMPP, Matrix and Signal are there, too.

[vizzah]

Yes, the article lost a significant amount of credibility right from the start by bringing up Durov and his well-known, ongoing rivalry with WhatsApp.

Telegram is a much worse messenger when it comes to E2E encryption and default settings.

[em-bee]

depends, at least he didn't claim that telegram is encrypted. the problem is that whatsapp encryption gives you a false sense of security, which arguably is worse than knowing your messages are not encrypted.

[ShinyLeftPad]

> Now, Telegram doesn't use End-to-End encryption by default at all, does it?

Underrated fact.

Also, no one knows who exactly operates Telegram and IIRC they don't even have an office. But we know Russian authorities have intense interest in it so it's hard to imagine FSB wouldn't figure out who it is and knock on their (or their relatives still in Russia) door. We know that Russian authorities previously banned Telegram, demanded encryption keys and then a bit later unbanned it saying "Pavel Durov was prepared to cooperate in combating terrorism and extremism on the platform".

[dotcoma]

AFAIK, the FSB knocked on Durov’s previous company’s door, VKontakte, a Russian Facebook knock-off.

They asked for info on some of their users, were told “no” and… they told Durov that “it would be a good idea if you sold this thing to someone else”.

Which he did, for decent money but probably a lot less than it was worth. He then used that money to start Telegram, at first from Berlin and later on from Dubai, from 2017 I think.

VKontakte (VK) eventually created Max, a newish IM service that the tiger-fighting shortie at the Kremlin is pushing onto Russians, while trying to limit their use of Telegram, that is or at least was the standard in Russia.

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2025/10/ru...

[omnimus]

This might as well be constructed story so people use Russian service (i doubt somebody would even consider it otherwise).

It would be very different if Telegram was all e2ee like Signal and with published client source code. But current state it's far more likely it's just a honeypot.