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Telegram chats by default are not end-to-end encrypted. It does have e2e-encrypted chats as an option, but they're only accessible on one device. So:

>how does telegram do this?

...the short answer is they don't.

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I was referring to them saving encrypted data on their servers. Isn't that e2e encrypted? If not, does that mean an adversary with access to their database knows my chats?

That is not end-to-end encrypted, no. The company has all the information necessary to retrieve your plaintext conversation data. They can (and likely do) encrypt this data at rest within their infrastructure, and they can make it as hard as they want for an individual employee to access this information, but fundamentally you're trusting that their internal controls are sufficient.

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