Why WhatsApp Will Never Be Secure
graph.orgThe world seems to be shocked by the news that WhatsApp turned any phone into spyware. Everything on your phone – including photos, emails and texts – could be accessed by attackers just because you had WhatsApp installed [1].
This news didn’t surprise me, though. Last year WhatsApp had to admit they had a very similar issue – a single video call via WhatsApp was all a hacker needed to get access to all of your phone’s data [2].
Every time WhatsApp has to fix a critical vulnerability in their app, a new…
This is an article written by telegram’s founder and CEO Pavel Durov in 2019 on “Why whatsapp will never be secure”. Your thoughts?
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And that UX makes it a hard sell to non-tech/privacy folks.
I had a few converts, then they pulled SMS. My converts left.
Telegram has its problems, I completely agree the encryption issue is problematic. But how do you get non-tech people to use a tool like this when to have a new device get the history, or signing into multiple devices simultaneously, requires transmitting an encryption key? I really don’t know.
I know SimpleX is working on this very issue - their current approach requires switching between active devices by scanning a QR code (or sharing code between devices out-of-band). So currently only one device can be active with your credsntials/ID. It has an ok UI, I’d say slightly better than Signal. But it’s security and privacy are just about the best I’ve seen.
This seems to be the big hurdle - people want a simple login, most don’t care if their convos are stored in servers iut means they can just login.
I’m using telegram with a few people for just this reason, since it gets us off SMS. They like that they can use whatever device is in front of them.
Getting people to switch to Telegram is far easier than anything else, since it’s UI is much better than Signal, Wire, XMPP clients (which can be some of the best).
We know exactly how bad Whatsapp is from a privacy standpoint - I’d choose telegram over it any day.
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I would prefer telegram because its just not from Meta. There is bounty on breaking telegram’s protocol too.
Telegram sells ads on public channels with consent of owners and the ads are based on the channel data and not users data. They are back up with their crypto schemes, infact idk whats wrong with crypto, they are better for privacy than normal bank transactions. Anyone cant pay from their pocket for lifetime, it was coming since longway because telegram have no parent company to fund it neither its founder are that rich to spend billions of dollars on it every year. Those “nitro” features didnt take anything away from free users tho, also if they are trying to cover up their cost from the userbase that just proves they have no dubious financing from backdoors.
I dont know how rape laws are connected with a messenger being based there. US have its social problems too or wherever signal is located, every country have social issues.
Yeah facebook is big enough reason to not use facebook. On top of that there have been no data breaches, almost no big outages in telegram till date. They offer a lot of features, from bots to channels, to large public communities and much more.
Telegram just claims its private enough and they never said they are e2ee by default, I dont see the misinformation here, yeah they exaggerate it sometimes but the fact that there have been no data breaches in a decade with almost 800 million monthly active users is quite a bit of achievement. They invested on developing their own encryption protocol, it maybe less private but they made it to remove complexities which signal have. There’s no point on having some 100% secure stuff when no one gonna use it due to complexities, telegram have fueled pro democratic protests worldwide and I thank them for that atleast (even they got banned in many countries for doing so).