It's not surprising that every time Telegram pops up here, many comments miss the fact that Telegram has a great UX, a great feature set and also provides the kind of privacy protestors value, i.e., not having their phone numbers flashed to every random stranger in groups or to random channel owners whose channels you've subscribed to. With Telegram you cannot even do a phone number enumeration attack (this can be changed in settings) by adding phone numbers to your contacts list to find out who's using it.
And nope, Signal doesn't make the cut for the above reasons because it exposes your phone number to everyone else. WhatsApp is the same in this respect. Neither of them prevent enumeration attacks (they may slow that down a bit, but not sufficient enough to protect against state actors).
Wire and Element (Matrix) are comparatively better than Telegram, Signal and WhatsApp because you don't need a phone number to sign up and they also have end to end encryption for all chats (with Element it's a bit more recent). Hopefully more people can soon ditch phone number based apps that cause them to be vulnerable because of that vector.
I love telegram. Great UI, feels natural to use it. And SO MANY features, it's hard to keep up.
Unlimited storage helps too.
When you realize end-to-end encryption is a necessary property of all features, you realize Telegram lacks even basic things like desktop clients, syncable chats, and group chats. Not so feature rich anymore ;)
E2E-encryption is really nice but not anymore necessary for most users of Telegram than for
- WhatsApp before they implemented it
- GMail (or any other mail service)
- Matrix (by default, until recently?)
- IRC
- SMS
- Letters in the mail
For some reason this has a tendency to boil down very quickly to
- E2E-encryptet === good, no further information needed
- anything else === bad, no further information needed
Which obviously isn't the whole truth:
It is far less likely give you trouble
- if you receive a stream of unencrypted postcards from Grandma on vacation
- than it is if you send and receive perfectly encrypted messages to/from a criminal mastermind over a channel that leaks metadata or by default backs up your data to any mainstream cloud provider.
The availability of metadata, who can access that metadata etc etc plays a role.
Telegram has significant problems, as far as I know both technically and also at higher levels, but for some reason someone always have to pull the E2E: Good, anything else: Bad.
That isn't useful.
That's such a bullshit excuse. Everything goes with outer layer of encryption these days, what matters is will Telegram offer to lock themselves out of the messages to which the answer is no by default. If you want to chat on desktop or create a group, the answer is no whether you like it or not.
So again, some niché use case of "it's probably nothing sensitive so you might as well send it in the clear because that says you're not a dissident" is thus not even valid. There's almost always outer layer of encryption.
"The availability of metadata, who can access that metadata etc etc plays a role."
Indeed. All the more reason to avoid Telegram that by default stores all that metadata.
"someone always have to pull the E2E: Good, anything else: Bad."
No the point is we'll never even get to the debate on reducing metadata as long as we need to play whack-a-mole with shit apps like Telegram that don't E2EE by default, let alone provide any kind of metadata protection, even sealed sender like Signal does.
As the author of messaging system[1] that provides both E2EE by default for everything as well as metadata protection (more than any other app out there) and advanced protections like endpoint security, I don't really like you putting me into some square of caring only about E2EE. All I can say to you is, first things first.