6mo ago

Telegram reports spike in sharing user data with law enforcement | TechCrunch

techcrunch.com

Spike is seen after arrest of telegram CEO Pavel Durov in France in august

28 comments

Element.io ~
- Better, but still not great, because a lot of metadata gets collected even if the conversations themselves do not. Might I suggest SimpleX instead?
  
  I actually tried SimpleX because of this person..
- Im pretty sure matrix.org data has been and will be sharing data with law enforcement. Even if you use encryption, they collect loads of metadata. With smaller servers it depends on local jurisdiction i guess.
  
  You don't have to be "pretty sure", you can just read their law enforcement policies here.
  They're not, nor have they ever been, a group of folk trying to hide from governments/LE: they're a legal company headquartered in the UK, and are bound by its laws.
  Having said that, they're also historically against the UK Government's attempts at instilling things like encryption backdoors.
  If you're still paranoid, host your own server; you can still use Element (the client hosted at Element.io) to access it.
  
  Matrix.org is one of my big concerns with Matrix, as it oversees most big groupchats. If you selfhost your server, chances are it is still observing some of your conversations due to just how big and prevalent it is.
  
  Of course they will. They only company that has actually ever refused, to my knowledge, is lavabit, and that's because they shut down their operations entirely when the gov demanded encryption keys due to Snowden.
  The fact that such an enormous portion of users and groups are on the matrix.org server is a huge problem.
- Threema is also really good, and they're very close to the full release of the desktop app.
  
  I really want to like it, but from a technical perspective, it just doesn't work well tbh.
I don't get it, everyone complained that telegram didn't shared data with law enforcement, now everyone complains that telegram started sharing it
- everyone complained that telegram didn’t shared data
  Who complained? All I remember is that their crypto and security sucks and we should stop using it.
- These are 2 distinctly different groups of people.
- My complaint wasn't sharing data with law enforcement. It was more about whether or not they should be moderating their platform and banning accounts that intentionally violate the policy. I don't necessarily have a problem with them sharing information with the police when it's warranted and there is a credible threat, because nobody should be using something to plan to bomb a restaurant or sports game. But the arguments that I have seen (and made) were pretty much "yeah, you shouldn't be allowed to plan to kill people on this platform with no moderation, especially when the chats aren't even encrypted".
  Even back when the CEO got arrested most of Lemmy was crying foul on that and a lot of comments I saw got downvoted for siding with the 'police state ".
It's a shame, it was a good app but if you haven't bailed already now is as good a time as any.
- If you're using encryption you probably don't have much to worry about. The main problem is so many people don't bother to encrypt their chats and make the assumption that their chats are encrypted. Yes, I think the default should be encryption turned on. But I also think this is user error, so.
  
  Aren't group chats unencrypted by design, with no option to encrypt? (I don't know, I don't use the app. Just something I vaguely recall somebody saying.)
Only thing I use it for is bots. If they want to know when someone is in my foyer, that’s fine.
Good thing I never used telegram.
- I use it for getting modded APKs

28 comments