Telegram was founded by Pavel Durov, the founder of a popular Russian social network called VK, after he fell foul of Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, and fled the country. But Telegram and Signal both have origin stories that help them sell the idea of total privacy. Some security experts have raised questions about its encryption methods even when the user has enabled them. It does not automatically enable the end-to-end encryption that would ensure that only the sender and receiver may read messages. Signal is indeed relatively secure, but Telegram might not quite live up to its sales pitch.

Even though all three services promise to keep users’ communications secure and to protect their privacy, the fact that WhatsApp is owned by Facebook makes some suspicious of it. The short answer is: concerns over privacy. Why have Signal and Telegram seen spikes whereas WhatsApp, the Facebook-owned messaging behemoth used by nearly 3bn people, has not? On January 12th Telegram bragged that it had surpassed 500m active users, with 25m signing up from around the world in the previous three days. In the week beginning December 28th, Signal was downloaded 246,000 times. This includes showing relevant offers and ads across the Facebook Company Products.”Ħ) For example, Signal doesn’t comply with GDPR’s Articles 27 and 28.ħ) The CLOUD Act entitles US authorities to access data from US IT service providers (even if the data is not stored in the US).TWO LITTLE-KNOWN messaging apps have dominated the Apple and Google app stores recently: Telegram and Signal.

Learn moreģ) WhatsApp generates unencrypted chat backups in Google cloud or iCloud.Ĥ) Telegram: By default, all messages are permanently stored on the server and could, in theory, be read by the service provider, the only exception being end-to-end encrypted single chats.ĥ) According to WhatsApp’s privacy policy, “As part of the Facebook Companies, WhatsApp receives information from, and shares information with, the other Facebook Companies.

1) Telegram: End-to-end encryption can be optionally enabled in single chats, but this feature is disabled by default and neither available in group chats nor compatible with parallel use of the service on multiple devices.Ģ) Group calls can be routed through media routers outside of Switzerland, depending on the location of the participants.

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