this post was submitted on 12 Jan 2024
80 points (76.0% liked)

Privacy

32003 readers
1092 users here now

A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

Related communities

Chat rooms

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

This is an article written by telegram's founder and CEO Pavel Durov in 2019 on "Why whatsapp will never be secure". Your thoughts?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] BearOfaTime@lemm.ee 4 points 10 months ago (1 children)

And that UX makes it a hard sell to non-tech/privacy folks.

I had a few converts, then they pulled SMS. My converts left.

Telegram has its problems, I completely agree the encryption issue is problematic. But how do you get non-tech people to use a tool like this when to have a new device get the history, or signing into multiple devices simultaneously, requires transmitting an encryption key? I really don't know.

I know SimpleX is working on this very issue - their current approach requires switching between active devices by scanning a QR code (or sharing code between devices out-of-band). So currently only one device can be active with your credsntials/ID. It has an ok UI, I'd say slightly better than Signal. But it's security and privacy are just about the best I've seen.

This seems to be the big hurdle - people want a simple login, most don't care if their convos are stored in servers iut means they can just login.

I'm using telegram with a few people for just this reason, since it gets us off SMS. They like that they can use whatever device is in front of them.

Getting people to switch to Telegram is far easier than anything else, since it's UI is much better than Signal, Wire, XMPP clients (which can be some of the best).

We know exactly how bad Whatsapp is from a privacy standpoint - I'd choose telegram over it any day.