Telegram

There is good news and bad news when it comes to Telegram. The good news: Video calls (and voice calls) are encrypted end-to-end which makes them private and secure from start to finish. Yay! The bad news: Text messages and files are not encrypted end-to-end by default. This means unless users chose to use Telegram’s “secret chat” feature which does use end-to-end encryption, this information could be vulnerable to eavesdroppers. For a messaging app that says it focuses on security, it might not be as quite as secure as users hope, unless extra steps are taken. Telegram also seems to have a third-party AI-bot problem. These AI-bots can do cool things like respond to messages and schedule reminders. They also can and have been abused and used for some pretty terrible things. Like last year when an AI-bot created abusive deepfake naked images of women and girls. Ick! And worse, researchers claim Telegram was initially not very responsive at taking this disgusting bot down. Double ick! More bad news: Telegram has had some pretty serious hacks and security flaws. In 2019, it was reported protesters in Hong Kong had their telephone numbers exposed and monitored by Chinese authorities. And there was a voicemail hack that reportedly exposed some Brazilian politicians' data. In 2020, Iranian hackers reportedly were able to get past Telegram’s security to spy on opponents. All in all, it seems a fair amount can and has gone wrong on Telegram. Couple that with instances of the spread of hate speech, violence, and abuse on the platform and we think there are better privacy and security focused apps out there like Signal and Threema.