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Telegram CEO charged in France for ‘allowing criminal activity’ on messaging app
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2024
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Privacy
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Telegram has no end to end encryption by default.
Yeah, I'm siding with the French government on this one at first blush. E2EE platforms are a necessary tool for combating government overreach and corporate surveillance. But if you willingly make a platform that's not E2EE, the idea of users being able to share this vile shit being a "necessary evil" toward the greater societal good completely falls apart. If you 1) have this vile content on your platform, 2) know it exists, 3) can trivially combat it in a targeted manner, and 4) choose not to, then you're complicit in its distribution.
I have no sympathy for a CEO who tries to dupe their userbase into believing their app is private and then not even take advantage of the one single ethical benefit to the platform not being E2EE.
That's a wild way of twisting the logic. Just because the platform doesn't fall under your e2ee definition doesn't mean they had to do something that is only possible on purely cloud services.
The reason for arrest doesn't even have anything to do with encryption. All content that facilitates mentioned crimes is public. Handling it shouldn't involve any backdoors or otherwise service-side decryption.
It is about encryption though. Since it's possible for him to get access to anything said in those group chats, they asked him to provide all Telegram has on those users and chats. He didn't, he got arrested.
He wouldn't have been in as much trouble if those chats were encrypted and Telegram couldn't know anything about what's said in what chat by which user.
Because hw wouldn't be "betraying" his users by giving everything that was asked of him by the authorities.
Again, the materials are in public groups. Anyone with an account can see them. If we imagine that Telegram had the same functionality as it does now over E2EE, the offending users would be sharing their keys in public, and Telegram would still be as viable.
Telegram deserves some pushback for misrepresenting themselves as secure (and for lying about their connections to Russia), but I wish Moxie fanboys were able to talk about Telegram without shouting "it's not E2EE" over and over because they don't understand it's a social network disguised as a messenger.
It would not be the same, access might remain public but if it was E2EE and not stored on Telegram's servers, new users wouldn't have access to the history of the channel.
And since Telegram would not be able to read the messages as they go through its servers, they would have plausible deniability if they were asked if they knew what was going on on which channels.
I don't think Signal is the best messenger out there, I do think it's an good compromise between privacy and to have a enough appeal that most people would use it. I don't agree with most of what I have read Moxie write. But thanks for judging and generalizing by guessing who I must be.
You are right that it's probably more of a social network.
Wording is confusing. Here are some better takes that sound valid and are true:
Telegram's e2ee is only available for chats of 2 people, and only on official mobile client.
Telegram's e2ee is a feature you have to enable whenever you need it (called secret chats).
This is incorrect, it is also available in other mobile clients (at least those which are forks of the official one).