Telegram is known as a privacy-focused secure messaging app because it markets itself that way. However, it is often criticized by security experts, privacy advocates, and people with common sense who can understand why its claims about being privacy-friendly don't make sense. In this brief article, I'll show you all
it is not hosted in the US or a country affiliated with the US, which makes it infinitepy more secure from the point of view of sovereign risk
No, it does not. There is a different primary actor, but that does not exclude anything.
The Telegram servers are in Miami, Amsterdam, and Singapore, so some data is still stored in the U.S.
In any case, it wouldn’t be any better to have data stored in a country like China or Russia.
Chinese and Russian authorities can’t steal me from my home and imprison and torture me for the rest of my life
No, but they do that to plenty of their own citizens.
Better something from a non-authoritarian country that doesn’t also happen to be in the Five Eyes intelligence network.
Oh, you mean the guys who were obviously such criminals they were run out of Russia and Europe and had to settle on being headquarted in Dubai?
Oh the guys who instead of doing something thoughtful like Mullvad and having RAM only servers with no logs, they just hide all their datacenters behind shell companies to avoid complying with legal subpoenas? That’s not completely shady at all, nope.
I mean, it’s not like Matrix or SimpleX chat or others that actually are secure (-ish, even Matrix leaks metadata!) and thoughtfully designed and open source that you can self host or don’t need servers or are incorporated in Europe (like Telegram tried to incorporate initially before settling on Dubai).
Oh and don’t forget France had very good reasons to arrest Pavel Durov, co-creator of Telegram. He went on Tucker Carlson to defend himself, which says it all, really.