Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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Is Telegram really an encrypted messaging app? (blog.cryptographyengineering.com)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Blog post by crypto professor Matthew Green, discussing what Telegram does (I wasn't familiar with it) and criticizing its cryptography. He says Telegram by default is not end-to-end encrypted. It does have an end-to-end "secret chat" feature, but it's a nuisance to activate and only works for two-person chats (not groups) where both people are online when the chat starts.

It still isn't clear to me why Telegram's founder was arrested. Green expresses some concern over that but doesn't give any details that weren't in the headlines.

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

If the metadata is being leaked then you have to assume it's being used in an adversarial way. Privacy can't be trust based. Either the protocol is secure and it guarantees that your metadata is private, or you're taking it on faith that people operating Signal servers are good actors and will never leak this data to anybody you wouldn't want them to.

Also worth noting that thanks to US laws, Signal would not even be allowed to say they're sharing data with the government even if they wanted to.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I have no doubt that signal will turn over whatever they had but does they have the info about who is contacting who?

I was explained that they don't

Obvi all this shit is a trust me bro

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

As far as I know, nothing in the protocol prevents the server from connecting who is talking to whom. In fact, given that the phone number is how an account is identified, the server effectively has to do this in order to pass messages between people.