this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2024
98 points (95.4% liked)
The Signal messenger and protocol.
1646 readers
3 users here now
founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
That’s a strange argument. I want my group chats with friends and family to be private. Why should Telegram or Meta be allowed to spy on my private conversations just because there are more than two people?
Look, I too love privacy and serverless software but give me a break. Complaining about your family group chats "not being private" (it's not exactly true) is like complaining why you can't host your cat photos on a TOR website (you can do that in fact).
In Telegram, chats (groups really) are called private if they are invite-only, and otherwise they are public.
When you create a group chat, even with just 2 people it's not e2e encrypted. Secret chats are, and they only work with 2 ends. You could create a group chat and selectively use secret chat with each member to share private stuff, but that would be quite a chore.
Chats are hosted on servers for the same reason why you host your (cat photos filled) homepage outside of your house. Just because stuff is hosted elsewhere doesn't mean it's being spied on.
From what I understand, there was no evidence that Telegram spies on your private chats. There are cases where Telegram is asked to take measures against certain person based on their activity in public chats ...by government of authoritarian regimes ...after Telegram tries and fails to oppose that request ...and it probably doesn't involve Telegram looking into messages made by the person in question in groups not mentioned in the original request (which would mean that person's family chats remain private).
So, if you live under an authoritarian regime and like discussing protest activities in your family group chat before some of your family members decides to report on you or share one of your messages in another public chat - the one who puts you in danger is yourself. And I doubt that chat not being hosted somewhere would save you from danger in that case.
Otherwise, your private groups are private and it's safe to chat with your family through Telegram.
Why would I use non encrypted group chat when I can just use Signal. Why use a product with bad security?
It doesn’t matter if there is evidence of Telegram spying or not. They have the capability to do it. And with all the companies selling customers data to train AI, I don’t want to risk it. And the best part is, that I don’t have to, because there is Signal and all my friends already use it.
I don’t mind things being hosted elsewhere as long as it’s encrypted and the host provider do not have the keys. That is not the case with Telegram. If you like Telegram, sure use it. But don’t use Telegram if you value privacy, use it because you like its user experience and know that you are sacrificing privacy. That might be fine for you, but not for me.
So you would prefer a platform to not have the keys to hosted content but allow that to every group member? That's not much different from sharing your credit card details with your friends.
People hate telegram for wrong reasons.
Problem is that "bad security" is a misleading description of how telegram handles data. I see, people like to say these words when they fear that "my text is going to be fed to AI" or "my files are going to be hosted on a hardware not under my control" and I disagree that these are security issues. The moment you allow someone else to host your content (even text) you should raise an alarm if you are so careful about those things. But you allow that with signal.
If someone wanted to report on you with signal, they still could. It may fail, not because its chats are e2e encrypted, but because they don't keep stuff on servers.
Hosting allows telegram have public communication features. You can basically use it to read news and comment on them. You can save your content, share it with your group and not worry that it will expire at some point or that new members of your group will not be able to see it. You can organize with other people for any activity, public or not.
So, Telegram provides features that are incompatible with privacy aspects some people want. Signal provides features that prevent it from becoming a platform for mass communication and communities. Both are fine. It's a mistake to compare them by the same standards.
That is not how encryption works. Not even remotely. You only share your public key with people you communicate with not your private key. This is not comparable with sharing credit card information. You need to read up on how encryption work.
And there is no reason Telegram could not host information and still encrypt it. Lots of services do that.
Look at ProtonMail/ProtonDrive they host mails and files without having any access to it. Look at Keybase, they host all kind of encrypted communications services without having access. Telegram could do it, they choose not to, and that should be a concern.
How so? Your family would have the same access to your private chats and nothing would stop them from using it with malicious intent.
How encryption works is not the issue. The issue is with people expecting it to protect content shared with a group.
Maybe read about how telegram handles data. It's encrypted.
What’s your point? The same goes for 1-1 chats. If you don’t trust the people you are communicating with encryption is not going to help you. It just happens that I do trust my friends and family. And it’s not about sharing specific sensitive information, it’s about using technology that prevents mass surveillance. And Telegram is just a bad tool for that. You might as well use Instagram.
Exactly.
You did not read, sigh.
Already stated above. People put themselves in danger by using public groups to discuss dangerous stuff. You prefer using an app that doesn't give you such a possibility and call it "secure". It doesn't make sense if you never wanted to discuss dangerous stuff or use public groups in the first place.
I dont know why you keep arguing that encryption should only be used to discuss dangerous stuff. It should be used to discuss private stuff. Like when I sit with my friends and talk, I want it to be private, not recorded in clear text and saved on some server. Not because it’s illegal or sensitive, but because it’s fucking private. And I can’t do that with Telegram, because it’s doesn’t encrypt my information.
ಠ_ಠ
No group chats are not.
Could you just read the thing? Private and group chats are called cloud chats and the image above describes them. Below is a graph for secret chats.
Yes “cloud chat” is not end to end, but only encrypted to the server. That’s what all services to including Facebook and Instagram. If it’s not end to end it’s useless.
Now you're just denying the obvious. You complained chats on telegram are not encrypted, and that's false.
Since both Facebook messenger and Instagram messenger use e2e you seem to really mean just Facebook and Instagram websites. And I wonder how could they be functional if they used e2e.
It's not and you probably realize that much.
No I'm being serious here.If it's not end-to-end encryption in groupchat, it's not private. And Telegram does not provide e2ee in groupchat. Thats the whole issue. Signal does that. Even iMessage does that.If it's not e2e somebody else does have access to your chats. In this case everybody with access to Telegrams servers, can read your group chats. And that makes it useless IMO. That is not the case with Signal.
Well then it really is "hey one company decided to do it this way so anything less than that is no longer acceptable" for you. For me, it's not all about absolute security. From my experience, people seeing my messages through the app and people accessing my phone is much more dangerous than people seeing my messages on a server used by the service. I know roughly what e2e for group chats implies and reasons why it's not implemented everywhere asap. We'll see where this leads Signal, maybe we'll also see cases of someone accessing data on Telegram servers etc.
For now, I mainly use my PC, so not going to infect it with another electron app, or recommend it among friends.
Seems false as I didn't find confirmations for that.
It's not implemented because it requires more resources and Telegram is too cheap to offer that. The same reason Telegram does not encrypt chat by default, but you have to actively choose secret chats. It's a way for Telegram to save money on server ressources. Both Signal and iMessage can provide e2e encryption for 1-1 messages and group messages and sync across devices.
We can agree that the Signal desktop app is kind of clunky, and I do hope it gets better in the future. Telegram might provide some usability, but it's not much better than using Facebook, if your concern is privacy. Mainly because the lack of e2ee in default chats and group chats.
Not just more. Exponentially more, if one is going to host the data on server.
It's dumb to call telegram cheap at this point. User base is too large and it handles it relatively well.
Signal, however, chose to not keep almost anything on servers, which mean it's literally cheap to serve, and it's very easy to call them cheap for not offering more features.
This is false. Again, "not using e2e" is not the same as "not encrypting".
Again, I have yet to see proofs of iMessage using e2e for group chats. Rather, things I read suggest the opposite.
Arguable due to many differences. But not going to waste our time on this. Though if your only concern is privacy better don't use the internet in the first place.
Apple does it.
It's on iMessage wiki and on the first page that comes up when you Google it:
https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/data/en/messages/
But do you have sources that proof that Apple is lying?
Nah, I will just use services that use e2e encryption for my private conversations. There are plenty of services that do that, not just Signal. But if you want to use a service that require access to your private conversations, you are free to do that. But why use a sketchy service with headquarters in Dubai that is like "trust us bro, we need access to your private conversations for totally legit technical cloud reasons, we totally wont look or share that information with anyone, pinky promise."
It doesn't say it works for group chats.
I got some complaints from people unable to leave conversations if they have less than 3 or 4 people, which suggests there are technical differences in how they work with many people. It's logical to suggest the switch from e2e to shared keys happens there.
Also no credible source suggests what you suggest
Also trusting apple is not a good thing in my book.
Apple is more sketchy for me lol.
You choose to rely on a service's promise that it doesn't host your data. I prefer relying on my experience which says dangers from individuals and conversations are more grave and more likely to be triggered than dangers from services those are being hosted on. I can't imagine anyone would benefit from spending time on reading or processing my conversations anyway. My messages can get long and it's not optimal for my devices to spend resources on constantly re-encrypting them for every chat member.
But if you must have it spelled out, here it is: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/security/sec70e68c949/web
Now you are just making things up. Apple explicitly write in their documentation, that this is not the case. So again, you suggest they are lying without any proof.
I see, you don't understand the nature of mass surveillance and surveillance capitalism. It's not really about individuals reading specific conversations..
It is a case that doesn't fall into "end to end" definition by default because in group chats there are more than 2 ends. Any implementation of group chat like that would be structurally nonstandard.
Thanks.
Just google "can't leave group chat" or something.
It is exactly about that, otherwise I don't see why would anyone care. Having grown up under a police state regime I live under assumption that the surveillance is everywhere anyway. Don't mind feeding surveillance capitalists with my messages, knowing how many options I have to make them choke. I know that if someone wants to cause me any problems, neither Telegram nor Signal would prevent that.