Telegram is preferable to Facebook-owned WhatsApp because of its superior encryption, privacy, security, and independence.
- In 2018, the British consulting firm Cambridge Analytica illegally harvested the personal information of tens of millions of Facebook users for use in political advertising.
- An EU privacy watchdog penalized WhatsApp $255M in 2021 for failing to disclose its data practices to nonusers and exchanging user data with other Facebook-owned companies.
Telegram encrypts your messages only while in transit from your gadget or device to their servers to protect your privacy.
Information sent via Telegram is encrypted during transit but decoded once it reaches Telegram’s servers. End-to-end encryption is crucial for this reason.
Is There A Way To Know If There Is Full Encryption With Telegram?
Telegram’s “private chats” are the only fully encrypted ones.
Standard private and group chats on Telegram aren’t end-to-end encrypted; only secret talks are.
That implies that Telegram can keep a record of your conversations and other personal data on their servers, where anybody can access it.
Use Telegram’s encrypted secret conversation feature if discretion is of the utmost importance. An additional layer of client-client encryption is applied to all your data, including text, media, and files.
And neither your ISP nor the owners of any Wi-Fi networks to which you connect can decode or intercept any media or files you send or receive using Telegram.
Free and secure encrypted messaging using Telegram:
- Make full use of end-to-end encryption.
- Eliminate all digital footprints from Telegram.
- Allow for communications to self-destruct.
- The ability to forward messages should be disabled.
To be clear, Telegram’s secret conversations are not stored in the cloud and can only be viewed on the device they were originally sent from.
Telegram Keeps Messages and Associated Metadata for a Year
Telegram’s privacy policy explains the company’s data collection practices, data storage methods, data usage, and data sharing policies.
It keeps track of your IP address, device info, and username changes for as long as a year.
As a public messaging service, it is obligated to cooperate with law enforcement to investigate criminal activity and, if requested, disclose your phone number and Internet Protocol address.
Despite Being Free and Open Source, Telegram Has Chosen To Employ Mtproto
When an app advertises itself as “open source,” it indicates that its source code is available for review by the general public and security professionals. This is a major contributing component to the app’s increased safety and veracity.
Still, there’s one minor hitch. Telegram’s proprietary encryption system is called MTProto.
Telegram created MTProto, and it is exclusively used by Telegram. Therefore, it has not been subjected to as many tests as other, more popular protocols. This means we would not be aware of any potential MTProto flaws, even if they exist.
