Truths and lies on Telegram (according to Telegram)

In recent days, the changes in the terms and conditions of use of Whatsapp have made news, which obliges users to accept the sharing of data with Facebook. Regarding this political choice, the Telegram press release arrives directly from the channel of its creator Pavel Durov:

“I've heard that Facebook has an entire department dedicated to understanding why Telegram is so popular. Imagine dozens of full-time employees.

I am happy to save Facebook tens of millions of dollars and reveal our secret for free: respect our users.

Millions of people are outraged by the latest change in Whatsapp's Terms , which now say users must share all their private data with Facebook's advertising engine. Unsurprisingly, the migration of users from Whatsapp to Telegram, which has already been underway for some years, has accelerated.

With around 500 million users and growing, Telegram has become a big problem for the Facebook company. Unable to compete with Telegram in terms of quality and privacy, Facebook's Whatsapp appears to have switched to covert marketing: Wikipedia editors recently exposed multiple paid bots that add biased information in Whatsapp's Wikipedia article .

We also found bots spreading inaccurate information about Telegram in social media. Here are the 3 myths that are pushing:

– Myth 1. “The Telegram code is not open source”. In fact, all of Telegram's client applications have been open source since 2013 . Our encryption and API are fully documented and have been reviewed thousands of times by security experts. Additionally, Telegram is the only messaging app in the world that has verifiable builds for both iOS and Android . As for Whatsapp, they have intentionally obfuscated their code, making it impossible to verify their encryption and privacy.

– Myth 2. “Telegram is Russian”. Indeed, Telegram has no servers or offices in Russia and was blocked there from 2018 to 2020 . Telegram is still blocked in some authoritarian countries like Iran, while Whatsapp and other "supposedly safe" apps have never had problems in these places.

– Myth 3. “Telegram is not encrypted”. Every chat on Telegram has been encrypted since launch. We have end-to-end secret chats and cloud chats that also offer secure and distributed real-time cloud storage . Whatsapp, on the other hand, had zero encryption for a few years, and then adopted a US government-funded encryption protocol . While we assume Whatsapp's encryption is solid, it is invalidated via several backdoors and dependency on backups .