Privacy

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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.

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When did you take privacy seriously? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 2 years ago by Amicchan@lemmy.ml to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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I still feel like I'm not taking privacy seriously enough. I haven't gotten a VPN yet because that requires pay and I am too lazy to try to get money. (I wish there were free (in pricing) VPNs.)

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[–] airikr@lemmy.ml -1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

You get monitored by Facebook in WhatsApp thanks to metadata and Facebook are trying to somehow detect what you have sent to provide personalized ads.

Telegram are built on privacy and security. Except for the metadata, you will not be monitored and the non-personalized ads are only visible in huge channels (like Pavel Durov's own channel) and groups. I am a member in Pavel's channel and I have seen zero (0) ads so far. Guess they haven't released this feature yet?

If you want E2EE in Telegram, stop using cloud chats and only focus on secret chats. They are working on adding secret chats to the desktop versions.

I am really looking forward to Telegram releasing the source code for MTProto as soon as Russia stops wanting the source code for themselves (Pavel's words, not mine). We all know how Russia is.

Everything else except MTProto are open sourced.

[–] fadelkon@info.prou.be 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I'm sorry to disagree. Matrix and Signal both offer end to end encrypted group chats, while telegram has done zero progress on this issue since it launched, that is before signal was even born from textsecure, chatsecure and redphone.

Telegram even did not open source their server code nor offer to federate. Worse than Signal. And finally, if you review their changelog, they just focus on addictive features: animations, glitter and "rounded edges" so to speak. This and a ton of minor usability improvements that make it super slick to use.

For me, Telegram is the new Twitter and the new Whatsapp, all together. With zero encription on server side. How far is the time when some data leak or theft happens? How far until all this huge chat history is used for data mining, marketing profilation, and finally, for violence against minorities or activists?

[–] airikr@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

https://telegram.org/faq#q-there-39s-illegal-content-on-telegram-how-do-i-take-it-down

https://telegram.org/faq#q-do-you-process-data-requests

https://telegram.org/faq#q-what-if-my-hacker-friend-says-they-could-decipher-telegram-mes

https://telegram.org/privacy#4-1-storing-data

https://telegram.org/faq#q-what-are-your-thoughts-on-internet-privacy

https://telegram.org/privacy#3-3-1-cloud-chats

I don't have the mentally strength to look for further sources.

[–] fadelkon@info.prou.be 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Thank you for all the sources. I've just finished reading them. Those tell me that they look to have good intentions, but don't reply to the fact that their "encrypted cloud chats" mean "we store all your content encrypted but we keep the key for you", and essentially: "we won't look at it".

However, they really can look at it. And at some point, Durov will change his mind, will die, will go bankrupt and sell all the databases, or maybe not. But you can't rely on this "maybe not" when we are talking about privacy or security (imo privacy is just a subset of security)

[–] airikr@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Thank you :)

Yes, they do have the power to decrypt your data and peak into it, but why should they? Pavel and his brother created Telegram mainly for privacy. Source: https://www.businessofbusiness.com/articles/why-telegram-founder-pavel-durov-made-the-worlds-most-anti-authoritarian-messaging-app/

I would love to see that you can self-host Telegram and also see the source code for MTProto. So far, they don't have done this. On their FAQ page, they say "yet" to making Telegram self-hosted and federated. With other words, they haven't decided if they will make Telegram self-hosted or not yet. Source: https://telegram.org/faq#q-can-i-run-telegram-using-my-own-server

I love privacy and I also love self-hosting. So much, that I am building my own services in order to not use other services, for an example a weather service. But I do trust Pavel because Telegram are awesome (duh) and because his purpose of Telegram and because he is informing his users and others in his channel about stuff (bonus link: the Telegram Geeks channel).

The future has not been written yet, but if Telegram continues to be this awesome, the future for Telegram is quite bright.