Why I Don't Trust Telegram

I don’t know where to start, to be honest, but I will start anyway lmao.

Privacy

My Telegram aversion started because of privacy concerns triggered by rumors and verified facts – like data being shared with governments while Telegram pretends to be the most secure and private messenger that will under no circumstances share anything with anyone. A messenger that claims to champion human rights and free speech, while simultaneously blocking opposition channels to satisfy the requests of corrupt officials who are in power and afraid of losing it.

As you may know, all of your precious chats with friends, family, and loved ones sit on their servers in plain text format, probably being analyzed and used to train AI models, I don’t have hard proof beyond my own deduction, which could be wrong, though this pattern is so common that I’m fairly convinced it’s true. Regardless, Telegram’s backend is not open source, so nobody knows the extent to which they exploit their users. How hypocritical and disgusting — they claim to be open source, but in reality it’s just a marketing campaign designed to win sympathy and cultivate an image.

It’s crazy and absurd that we live in a world where our communication, which is an aspect of life that is meant to be private – simply isn’t. They know a great deal about you, and it’s barely legal and not ethical by any measure. And indeed, it is their business model, the very thing that keeps them alive. The frightening part is that this is fine with most people: those who don’t think about privacy, who don’t value their right to it, perhaps until they lose it and realize that the privacy they thought they had was an illusion manufactured by big tech to extract more money.

Questionable Reputation

There have been various cases where Telegram was caught sharing data or conducting surveillance for governments (I assume you’ve heard of some of this; I’m also not inclined to dig up links, so I invite you to look into it yourself), or simply being an insecure platform with a dubious reputation as one associated in many countries with drug trafficking. This kind of reputation doesn’t form out of nowhere. While some of it may be exaggerated, the overall picture it paints is not one I want anywhere near me.

The man behind the company, Pavel Durov, is a questionable figure, in my humble opinion. Hearing his hypocritical claims about living humbly and simply sounds like a joke – he has been spotted on private jets and living a rather lavish life on multiple occasions. And that in itself isn’t the issue; I’m genuinely glad he’s doing well and can afford what he wants. The point is that I cannot stand the image, one I find deeply off-putting, and which gives me no reason whatsoever to want to use a product from someone I have no trust or respect for.

Support

Another aspect I find absurd is their support, or rather, the absence of it. I know many people who’ve experienced painfully long response times (anywhere from several weeks to many months), if they were lucky enough to receive any response at all. I have my own experience with Telegram support, or rather, I don’t.

The story goes like this: my father’s Telegram was hacked due to a lapse in judgment on his part – he probably accessed some kind of third-party app within Telegram that handed account access to scammers, who then successfully took over his account with the classic goal of impersonating him to borrow money.

Thankfully, I noticed fairly quickly, within a few hours of the incident. The scammers made it impossible to log back in by abusing Telegram’s rate limit and then disabling the SMS login option, making account recovery essentially impossible. The only thing I had left to hope for was Telegram support, which is infamous for its glacial response times, if not outright silence. In my case, I have yet to receive any reply, and it has been almost a month since the incident. They pretend to have a support team; in reality, they don’t.

Bloat

Not to mention “useful” features like stories and other bloatware that makes the experience increasingly irritating rather than simple. Do one thing and do it well, so says the Unix philosophy, which I’ve long been a fan of, along with many others who share it.

I don’t need a social network, a gamified experience, crypto, or to hand over my contacts so they can populate a database to be sold. I also don’t need to entrust an unaccountable company with storing my messages in plain text. As you can see, I’m done.

Getting Rid of It

For now, fortunately or not, I have many people on Telegram and all of them are from Ukraine. In France, almost nobody uses Telegram; instead they use WhatsApp, which is the same sort of thing I’m trying to get away from. So the question is larger than just Telegram – it’s about one’s right to privacy and autonomy.

It’s been somewhat difficult to deal with. I can’t deny reality: many of my friends, acquaintances, and a few family members use Telegram. Going cold turkey is unrealistic and counterproductive in my case, so I’m trying to gradually reduce the number of people I communicate with through it, until hopefully one day I can delete it entirely and never look back. The same applies to WhatsApp, though that’s more complicated as it’s the dominant messaging app in France and much of Europe.

WhatsApp is unavoidable here, and I only use it for things I don’t particularly care about, or when I simply have no choice – like staying in the loop with university classmates.

With close friends, my parents, my brother, and anyone willing to stay in touch and get timely responses from me – I use Signal. It’s the best solution I’ve found, and it more than satisfies me. The challenge is that not many people use it, but that’s not as big a problem as it might seem. I actively encourage and promote Signal, and I’ve had real success moving the people who matter most to me over there.

Other secure options exist, like Element (built on the Matrix protocol) or Threema, but they’re so unknown among the people in my life that it’s not worth the effort — especially since I’m more than happy with Signal, which is open source and end-to-end encrypted by default.

Vive le FOSS !

Thanks for reading :)