Would you like to leave WhatsApp, the private messaging application owned by Facebook?
You're not alone. Following a delayed and confusing Terms of Use update that will allow WhatsApp to share your data with its parent company, privacy-conscious users are looking for alternatives.
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Telegram has been around since 2013, but is currently having a moment. Following the controversy over WhatsApp, the company, which bills itself as a privacy-focused service that provides both one-on-one secure messaging as well as more social features like group chats, said it won 25 million users over a 72-hour period in mid-January. The service says it now has 500 million active users.
Telegram is often bundled with Signal, another popular messaging app among those looking for a secure messaging solution.
But what is Telegram? How does it compare to WhatsApp and Signal? And how concerned should you be that it involves terrorists, far-right extremists and distributors of revenge porn? We'll take a look.
Who owns Telegram ?
Telegram is owned by the same two people who founded the company in Russia in 2013, Pavel Durov and his brother Nikolai. Pavel is also the CEO of the company.
Pavel Durov was Russia's Mark Zuckerberg, as he originally founded that country's largest social networking site, known as VK. The company made him a billionaire.
While VK still exists, Pavel has completely with the social platform he founded in 2014. VK was known for fighting back against Kremlin censorship. Then, allies of Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin consolidated their shares in the company to take a stake. Pavel was forced to leave his post, sold his remaining shares and left Russia for Germany. According to Pavel, he was expelled for refusing to provide VK user data to the Russian government or for closing a group for anti-corruption advocate and opposition leader Alexei Navalny that was circulating on the social network .
Telegram is Pavel's continuation of online free speech efforts that began with VK. The company is registered in the United States as an LLC. The team has moved since its inception and was last reported in .
The Telegram is it secure?
The current rise in popularity of Telegram comes from users looking for a more secure messaging app. The company makes a point of emphasizing confidentiality. Interestingly, however, Telegram has a shaky history about it.
Unlike other secure messaging app options, Telegram does not have end-to-end encryption by default. End-to-end encryption ensures that only the parties involved in the communication, i.e. the sender and the recipient, can read the messages. Even the email application that hosts the servers where these messages are stored cannot read them.
In order to enable end-to-end encryption on Telegram, you must make your chats “secret”. And you need to do this one by one with each of your contacts.
However, even in this case, all messaging features of Telegram are not end-to-end encrypted. One of the most popular features of Telegram is his group chats. These are not end-to-end encrypted. Messages are also not sent to you by people who are not in your contact list and for whom you have not yet enabled end-to-end encryption.
Controversies over telegrams
The unique combination of private messaging and social media features of Telegram appealed to certain types of users. Additionally, the app has very lax content moderation in order to reinforce its privacy-focused bona fides, which is also attractive to these users.
Unfortunately, some of these users are extremists. The messaging app has had issues with foreign terrorists using the app. Telegram was once a major online propaganda tool for groups like , although the company has cracked down on this in recent years.
Meanwhile, neo-Nazis and white supremacists have proliferated on the platform, using it as a recruitment tool. Far-right figures like Milo Yiannopoulos and Laura Loomer, who have been banned from more mainstream social media platforms, have found a home on Telegram. More recently, Telegram became a major hub for supporters of the far-right QAnon conspiracy in the wake of .
As Mashable did, Telegram also has a huge revenge porn problem, with users freely sharing non-consensual porn images on the platform.
Telegram has already removed some public group channels. More recently, the company purge some neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups spreading hatred. However, Telegram is known for his cowardly moderation. Additionally, the company itself cannot view these end-to-end encrypted private chats.
The many controversies of Telegram even led to a lawsuit…against Apple, which was recently sued in an attempt to have the app removed Telegram from its App Store by the iPhone maker for the same reason it removed Talk: Extremist Content.
What is the difference between Telegram et WhatsApp ?
Chances are good that if you consider Telegram as your new messaging app of choice, you leak WhatsApp.
In 2014, Facebook announced the purchase of popular messaging app WhatsApp. Since then, the social media giant has mainly dealt WhatsApp as a separate entity from its social networking platform.
Everything changed at the beginning of 2021 when WhatsApp its terms of service to inform users that their data would now be shared with its parent company, Facebook. Many users were outraged. But it turns out it's a much more nuanced change than people originally thought.
In fact, when you send messages WhatsApp to your friends and family, they remain end-to-end encrypted by default. These are actually just messages with some companies that may not be end-to-end encrypted, depending on what third-party access they have enabled for hosting services. The app will alert you about the level of privacy you can expect for a given message via color-coded alerts at the top of your message.
While WhatsApp tried to clarify these changes after the initial outcry, users who already have Facebook would not be convinced. The scale of the exodus of WhatsApp is unclear, but while competitors like Signal and Telegram soared to the top of the App Store charts, WhatsApp has completely fall among the top 20 apps.
Many of these security-conscious users seem to have landed on Telegram. Ironically enough, if security is your first concern, WhatsApp is the best choice. The messages WhatsApp, with a few exceptions, are end-to-end encrypted by default – and that includes group chats. Users of Telegram, on the other hand, must choose the “secret chat” option to get end-to-end encryption, and these messages can only be between two people. So there is no way to have end-to-end encrypted group chats.
Telegram, in some ways, functions as a social network even more than WhatsApp, the messaging service managed by a social network. Users of Telegram can choose a username along with the required phone number registration, while WhatsApp and other messengers link your identity to your phone number. Telegram can also host up to 200 users in a single group chat. On WhatsApp, the group chat limit is 256 people.
In terms of data privacy, many people have been frustrated by the idea that WhatsApp starts sharing data with Facebook. But, in fact, it has already been has been going on for years. The problem is metadata, like your location, who you're talking to, and more, not the content of specific messages.
Still, metadata can tell you a lot about a user and that's not insignificant in terms of privacy concerns. It is therefore important to note that Telegram collects the same type of metadata as WhatsApp. Additionally, the contents of unencrypted messages are also stored on their servers, which is not the case for most messages on WhatsApp, which are end-to-end encrypted by default.
When it comes to choosing between Telegram et WhatsApp, here's what you want to consider: If you're looking for a courier that collect less of your data, choose WhatsApp. If you are looking for a messaging app that less likely to use this data somehow, Telegram is your choice. Telegram has already been registered saying they have no interest in selling the business or advertising to users, therefore your data is the least likely to get into the hands of third-party organizations.
WATCH: Why Signal is the messaging app everyone's talking about
OK, but what about Telegram against Signal?
If you are looking for a really secure email alternative to WhatsApp, choose instead Telegram.
Signal is, by far, the most secure of these messaging platforms. Messages are end-to-end encrypted right out of the box. Users can even set messages to disappear after a certain amount of time.
Another major security advantage is how little data Signal collects from you. All you provide to Signal is a phone number. The signal is even on a system that would not require giving them your phone number and would instead involve storing user identities securely on their servers. The Signal app is free and open source software.
In the past, the FBI has used Signal to obtain information about a user. The only data the company was able to provide was the date the user's account was created and the last time they logged in. This is how little Signal collects.
Signal is really intended for one-on-one communication with people you know, although you can create group chats with up to 1 participants. However, if a user wants a more social media-focused messaging app, that's when they'll choose Telegram. Remember that these group chats Telegram are not end-to-end encrypted.
Where to download Telegram
If you are looking to download Telegram, you can go to for desktop versions of the app for Mac and PC. Mobile versions of the application Telegram are available on Apple for iPhone and iPad and on For Android.
UPDATE: January 28, 2021, 11:59 a.m. CST This article has been updated to clarify the specifics of the changes to the Terms of Service of WhatsApp and the types of data the apps collect.
