Comment by tptacek
2 years ago
Signal (and Signal's phone number model) predates Telegram. It was designed as an SMS and WhatsApp replacement; that is, it was originally designed to replace insecure phone-number-addressed systems.
Obviously, the cryptographic guarantees of the two systems aren't even close to comparable.
May be. But that feature wasn't there since 2014. Signal has adopted a lot of "social media" feature from WhatsApp and Telegram over the years.
They're messengers. They have messenger features. The details of how those features are implemented is what matter. Last I checked, Telegram doesn't even have encrypted group messaging, and it has a serverside database of who's talking to who.
I don't know what "feature" you're talking about not existing until 2014, but before Open Whisper Systems, the thing we call Signal was "TextSecure", a literal SMS replacement.
>They're messengers. They have messenger features.
And some are better at being messengers than others.
8 replies →
TextSecure and Redphone did not upload your contacts to the cloud. No need to be a security expert to know that it's unwise to leak user state to contacts. In fact textsecure (now Silence) is the first SMS app to have a different colors for each contact to help the user avoid mistakingly messaging the wrong person.