Telegram Encryption

From the article:
“This post is inspired by the recent and concerning news that Telegram’s CEO Pavel Durov has been arrested by French authorities for its failure to sufficiently moderate content. While I don’t know the details, the use of criminal charges to coerce social media companies is a pretty worrying escalation, and I hope there’s more to the story.

But this arrest is not what I want to talk about today.

What I do want to talk about is one specific detail of the reporting. Specifically: the fact that nearly every news report about the arrest refers to Telegram as an “encrypted messaging app.” Here are just a few examples:

This phrasing drives me nuts because in a very limited technical sense it’s not wrong. Yet in every sense that matters, it fundamentally misrepresents what Telegram is and how it works in practice. And this misrepresentation is bad for both journalists and particularly for Telegram’s users, many of whom could be badly hurt as a result.

Now to the details.

…

Telegram clearly fails to meet [this] stronger definition for a simple reason: it does not end-to-end encrypt conversations by default. If you want to use end-to-end encryption in Telegram, you must manually activate an optional end-to-end encryption feature called “Secret Chats” for every single private conversation you want to have. The feature is explicitly not turned on for the vast majority of conversations, and is only available for one-on-one conversations, and never for group chats with more than two people in them.”

Please read the entire post here

Not everyone knows that enabling end-to-end encryption on Telegram is actually somewhat cumbersome, hard to find, and has to be enabled, from both ends, for EVERY text communication in order to be “secure”. It really seems to me like this media propaganda may be a lure to try to get people to support telegram and use it THINKING it’s encrypted, so they can expose and find people who might think they are enjoying some form of privacy.

If you are looking for something that is absolutely secure, sorry, it doesn’t exist. The safest thing is meatspace. Every form of communication has risk, period. Some forms are a bit more secure than others, such as Session (a fork of Signal, which is actually quite good, but doesn’t require a phone number or email address), Wire, and Viber. Your behavior online is also critical to your security, but that’s for another post. I prefer Session, but that’s just me. Any chats you’ve had on Telegram have NOT been encrypted unless you actively enabled them EVERY SINGLE TIME.