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Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

If Telegram were protecting the identity of HK protestors they would say this.

If they were selling the HK protestors out to the Chinese government they would also say this.

True trustworthyness can only come from open source code and concepts designed into the protocol. I don't think this can be achieved on Apple's platform, might be possible on Android.

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Knowing the founder, find it hard to believe. The guy who fled Russia to avoid persecution has little tolerance for any government trying to mess with people's privacy. Culturally, Russia itself has a lot more in common with the west. China is completely separated, from, I would say, the rest of the world, in terms of mentality. It's even different from most Asian countries and Hong Kong. Find it hard to imagine why would anyone cooperate with China on doing things the western world considers immoral and unacceptable.

I am not sure how open sourcing the code would help? If they have a bad intent, they could publish a "clean" source code and deploy something else.

You can compile the open source and compare the result to the version on the store.

The protestors aren't using the encryption features. They just don't want their phone numbers to be revealed as being associated with the groups used to coordinate the demonstrations.

True for the client side but you can not be sure on the server side.

Smart contract enables the true transparent and honest program but the technology is not ready yet. It is still early days.

What about https://tox.chat/

I think it's hard to make an argument that China has a lot of leverage on Telegram as an organization, but that could change in years to come. A decade ago, no one really thought Google would become this hostile to users and even seek to collaborate with the CPC govt and its totalitarian vision.

Everything you said about open-source applies to Android too. At the very least all kinds of backdoors are in Android phone because of chip firmware. But I guess you might be alluding to the fact that Tim Cook handed over Apple iCloud keys to the Chinese govt.

No, it's impossible to know what code is running on someone else's server. If you give your phone number to someone, you are at their mercy to keep it confidential.

The article is discussing specific features that Telegram is adding to make it harder to do matching on numbers to identify aliases.

This is not a general proclamation.

> might be possible on Android.

Especially on Google platform with every click tracking.

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