I’m not who you replied to, but I agree with his sentiment about signal being superior to telegram in terms of security (or more specifically, privacy).
For me, there’s two big reasons for this:
Signal chats are E2E at all times, while Telegram is only E2E when you explicitly create a “secret chat” with whoever you’re conversing with. I don’t fault Telegram too much for this, because they still provide the option to use E2E for everything, but Signal gets brownie points in my book because they just do it by default without getting in the way of the User.
Secondly, as far as I know, Telegram uses their own in house encryption techniques as opposed to industry standards. I am not at all knowledgeable about encryption or cryptography— I only know what’s required of me in my job (basically the bare minimum), and so I don’t actually know whether this is anything of serious concern. It could very well be that Telegram’s encryption techniques are just as effective as the established norms, but I do see the general consensus trending towards “roll your own encryption = bad, use established norms = good”, which is primarily what I am basing my opinion on here.
To further detract from my own point, it actually seems like Telegram might be using “established norms” for encryption nowadays anyways [1], although I couldn’t really tell from the brief description I read on Wikipedia.
Overall, I think Telegram is perceived as being less secure than Signal primarily because of the reputation Telegram has for implementing their own in house encryption techniques, even if they don’t use those techniques anymore— their name has become associated with their known history of using ad hoc encryption.
Chats are not e2e encrypted by default, they are just encrypted in transit. However this allows chats to be synced across many devices, so it is very very convenient.
Telegram has e2e encrypted chats but only on mobile and not on desktop for some reason.
telegram is e2ee only for secret chats, all other chats & group chats are not e2ee (which means telegram can access their content at will on the servers)
Synced chats across devices is possible with e2ee, even signal has this, it's just one edge that's poorly implemented: initial sync of the chat history and afaik they haven't fixed this yet, but all messages after setting up a new device are in sync as far as i know
I’m not who you replied to, but I agree with his sentiment about signal being superior to telegram in terms of security (or more specifically, privacy).
For me, there’s two big reasons for this:
Signal chats are E2E at all times, while Telegram is only E2E when you explicitly create a “secret chat” with whoever you’re conversing with. I don’t fault Telegram too much for this, because they still provide the option to use E2E for everything, but Signal gets brownie points in my book because they just do it by default without getting in the way of the User.
Secondly, as far as I know, Telegram uses their own in house encryption techniques as opposed to industry standards. I am not at all knowledgeable about encryption or cryptography— I only know what’s required of me in my job (basically the bare minimum), and so I don’t actually know whether this is anything of serious concern. It could very well be that Telegram’s encryption techniques are just as effective as the established norms, but I do see the general consensus trending towards “roll your own encryption = bad, use established norms = good”, which is primarily what I am basing my opinion on here.
To further detract from my own point, it actually seems like Telegram might be using “established norms” for encryption nowadays anyways [1], although I couldn’t really tell from the brief description I read on Wikipedia.
Overall, I think Telegram is perceived as being less secure than Signal primarily because of the reputation Telegram has for implementing their own in house encryption techniques, even if they don’t use those techniques anymore— their name has become associated with their known history of using ad hoc encryption.
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telegram_(software)#Architec...
Also, Telegram does not even have e2ee as an option for group chats while Signal does. That's a pretty big deal!
Chats are not e2e encrypted by default, they are just encrypted in transit. However this allows chats to be synced across many devices, so it is very very convenient.
Telegram has e2e encrypted chats but only on mobile and not on desktop for some reason.
telegram is e2ee only for secret chats, all other chats & group chats are not e2ee (which means telegram can access their content at will on the servers) Synced chats across devices is possible with e2ee, even signal has this, it's just one edge that's poorly implemented: initial sync of the chat history and afaik they haven't fixed this yet, but all messages after setting up a new device are in sync as far as i know
> However this allows chats to be synced across many devices
I use Matrix with e2e encryption, and my chats are synced just fine.