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Comment by chvid | Hacker News Reader

First; remember there are two "TikToks": The Chinese version which is mostly in Chinese and operates mostly in China and then the western version which we all know and love.

The first one you can be sure operates under Chinese law and shares data with the Chinese authorities.

The second; my bet is that ByteDance wants to sell it off probably through an IPO on an American exchange. That is why the have hired an American CEO. And that is why they make announcements similarly to Facebook and Google on Hong Kong.

What will happen in Hong Kong? Will all these American social medias be banned because they refuse to follow what is now Hong Kong law?

Essentially expanding the great firewall of China to include Hong Kong ... we will see but my guess is probably not.

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> we all know and love

No, we don't all love the spyware app called TikTok

I'm pretty sure that was sarcasm.

Hong Kong people are using Telegram excessively for quite some time.

Given the reputation of Telegram[0][1], I hope its popularity wanes among Hong Kong people whose mindset is not aligned with furthering CCP goals.

WhatsApp with its E2E-encrypted-by-default chat built on Signal protocol is the lesser evil among the popular messengers, since (1) you never risk forgetting to turn E2E on, and (2) once chat is E2E (read: always), there is no turning over of its contents to the government.

Anecdotally, having lived in Hong Kong for two years, I still don’t have Telegram and am yet to meet a person who is not using WhatsApp.

If WhatsApp does get banned, I hope by that time (improved) Signal and (improved and renamed) Riot offer viable alternatives.

[0] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/telegram-rus...

[1] https://cpj.org/2016/05/why-telegrams-security-flaws-may-put...

WhatsApp is owned by Facebook, a company known for dark patterns and lying. Between them and Telegram, I'd be more comfortable to choose the latter.

Whatsapp could simple "accidentally" leak data or "accidentally" sell data to Chinese government. Since it is ow ed by Facebook and we have recently of course seen again what ethics mean to Facebook's leader, I would not put it past Whatsapp to do this.

Unlike Telegram, WhatsApp has no recorded history of agreeing to cooperate with a government and implying capabilities of censoring E2E content.

Meanwhile, the government Telegram has apparently agreed to compromise E2E in favor of appears to have closer ties with China than the US does, and seems to be testing[0] GFW-like approaches to internet censorship.

[0] https://en.hromadske.ua/posts/russia-test-drives-its-great-f...

> Meanwhile, the government Telegram has apparently agreed to compromise E2E in favor of appears to have closer ties with China than the US does

Could you explain what makes you think that’s the case?

Chinese hardware approved for and used in key Russian networking infrastructure[0], absence of trade/tariff war, joint large-scale strategic military drills past two years, adjacent geography, shared regime traits, etc.

[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2019/11/03/huawei-so...

I don't understand how this relates to Telegram. They have no relationship with the russian government.

You may have skipped the link in the first footnote in my top-level comment.

In short: Russia has been blocking Telegram for over a year, demanding developers to compromise E2E encryption of chats. Last month Russia unblocked Telegram, and a quote attributed to its developer indicates they have developed ways to censor chats. The circumstances are hazy and there had been no clear communication from the developer.

This and other issues with Telegram (some of which are mentioned elsewhere in the thread) make it, to me, not trustworthy enough for sensitive uses, Hong Kong situation included.

> Last month Russia unblocked Telegram, and a quote attributed to its developer indicates they have developed ways to censor chats.

That’s a stretch. We don’t know why the ban has been removed, and it’s definitely suspicious but other reasons are possible. We are missing information to jump to “telegram compromised their end to end encryption”. Another possible explanation: Russia government doesn’t have infinite resources, spent years trying to block telegram to push them to accept their demand, that didn’t work so they stopped and are investing in other solutions.

> We don’t know why the ban has been removed, and it’s definitely suspicious but other reasons are possible.

Exactly that: we don’t. “Suspicious but possibly OK” is not good enough under sensitive circumstances, especially in addition to the host of other issues with Telegram’s reputation.

The comment upthread suggesting Telegram’s popularity in HK worries me, I should be more active at educating friends.

In the context of Hong Kong, that's fair, I think that we would agree.

You are right about wanting to know exactly of course.

I have a question though: What could Telegram have done, once unblocked by Russian government, to make sure we know exactly and don't need to be suspicous?

Acknowledge this happened, clarify what changed, be honest if and how the new state of affairs compromises privacy and under which circumstances (if any) it affects E2E chats.

Otherwise they’ll get rumours about “striking a deal” with the government, developer going bankrupt and caving in to the influence of rich Russian investors, and so on.

So nothing regarding Telegram? Because your comment clearly implies that Telegram is at fault here:

> [...] Telegram has apparently agreed to compromise E2E [for Russia]

>capabilities of censoring E2E content

WTF this even mean?

It is oxymoronic, yes, and you are echoing my very concerns :)

Signal for sure has improvements it can do but it's not like it's unusable. Why you would think WhatsApp, who is owned by a shady company, run by a robot, is better than signal, is beyond me.

I respect Signal. My primary rationale is that I do not routinely meet people who use it. Coupled with the reports of subpar UI, so far I have chosen not to go through the friction of setting it up and converting my conversation partners to it.

Between Telegram (product co-developed by the creator of the Russian clone of Facebook, owning company of unknown organizational structure) and WhatsApp (product co-developed by co-founder and current CEO of Signal Foundation, current owning company spent a lot of time in recent years under high scrutiny), I consider the latter more trustworthy despite some of its drawbacks.

Yes. I don't think the protester were using TikTok so I guess what TikTok is doing is mostly symbolic.

ByteDance makes both douyin and tiktok

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