does your supermarket accept payments in Monero?

No. Privacy is illegal in the banking/financial system.

You are the one making up a fantasy scenario to satisfy your authotarian urges.

Dis you miss the entire Snowden revelations? Western governments are hostile to online privacy and freedom.

This is the standard excuse for authoritarian governments. Use a crime category no one can object to.

ANYONE who understood how telegram works and also felt it was a tool for privacy doesn’t really understand privacy in the digital age.

Telegram is the most realistic alternative to breaking Meta’s monopoly. You might like Signal very much, but nobody uses it and the user experience is horrible.

there are plenty of clear cut examples of where telegram should shut down channels - CSAM etc… that’s what this arrest was about; the rest is academic

Was it? The French authorities did not provide any convincing evidence, just accusations.

This is pure nonsense.

Western governments hate Telegram because until now Telegram didn’t cooperate with Western intelligence services like American social media companies do. Everything on Meta or Google gets fed into NSA, but Telegram has been uncooperative.

This will likely change after Durov’s arrest, but it was nice while it lasted.

which still use Google services.

Russia tried for years to ban Telegram. They stopped after Telegram managed to keep itself alive by proxies.

Free speech is good. Government regulated speech is bad.

Well, except Telegram isn’t a good tool for privacy.

If Telegram wasn’t good for privacy, Western governments would not be trying to shut it down.

E2EE is nice, but doesn’t matter if the government can just sieze or hack your phone. Much better to use non-Western social media and messaging apps.

They also allow known criminal activity to thrive.

Most scammers I have seen are operating out of Facebook or Instagram.

I know Telegram is good, because every Western government is trying to shut it down.

Governments want to make it illegal to have privacy. Durov’s arrest was one of the many steps they are taking in that direction.

Because Google’s monopoly on the appstore is just great, right?

I love lemmy, but it’s irrelevant on the big picture. Same with Signal.

They don’t even bother reporting Signal usage, it’s a round off error: https://www.statista.com/statistics/258749/most-popular-global-mobile-messenger-apps/

Telegram has almost 1 billion users, half as many as WhatsApp

If you have a backdoored client, then you would naturally object to third party clients :)

Some of my favourite red flags:

Signal’s dependence on Google libraries: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/9044#issuecomment-535194837

Signal dev bullshitting a non-answer and then hilariously refuting his non-answer: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/9044#issuecomment-534340623

Signal hiding its serverside source code for many months: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/11101

You can find many more examples.

The last one about server side code, together with Signal’s funding sources and their obsession with phone numbers code leads me to suspect that Signal is just a honeypot by US intelligence.

Lots of red flags here in Github: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/9044

Nobody is coming after Signal because nobody uses Signal. Telegram has a user base of almost 1 billion.

Those clients exist despite Signal Foundation, not because they encourage community development. They are doing everything they can to discourage third party app development.

If you backdoored your client, then you will naturally oppose anyone else who develops a client.

Signal is nowhere close to being popular.

Telegram has almost 1 billion users, which is why governments are unhappy with it. Signal is a niche toy for a very small number of people.

Telegram is available on F-Droid. Signal is not. Whatever is Signal doing, it’s pretty bad.

Signal’s hostility to F-Droid is the problem.

I’m not using Signal until it’s on F-Droid.

Signal’s hostility to 3rd party clients is a huge red flag.

Signal’s hostility to third party clients is a huge red flag.

They also refuse to distance themselves from Google’s app store.

The fact that governments want to shut down Telegram and arrest its founder shows that Telegram is pretty good for privacy.

You know you are an authoritarian country when you arrest CEOs of messaging apps.

DNS66 does the job on Android: https://f-droid.org/packages/org.jak_linux.dns66/

Are chromium derivatives like Brave affected?

Laws apply only if you are Chinese.

The war on cash is a war on privacy.

It’s now illegal in many parts of Europe to make large cash transactions.

Governments love the idea. It’s much easier to collect taxes or punish dissidents in a cashless society.

cashless society is a really stupid idea. it’s not worth sacrificing privacy and stability for a tiny bit of convenience.

Those kids will install a VPN faster than this bill goes through the Spanish parliament.