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Comment by hiq | Hacker News Reader

> Do you make sure that in group chats no one there ever enables it by accident? Because it's really, really easy to inadvertently do.

Fair comment. Still, at that point, you're trusting a third party just like in Telegram case. In any case, if anything, the default settings in WA are closer to an ideal E2EE than Telegram.

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Telegram is not a third party. It's the only party you trust. When you use whatsapp, you trust Whatsapp, Facebook and Google.

The default setting in whatsapp is to show a full screen prompt asking you to backup to google drive. 98% of users enable this, meaning it is worse than Telegram. You don't even know who has enabled it.

> you trust Whatsapp, Facebook

You don't trust WA nor Facebook regarding your data, which is what we were discussing. You do trust them regarding your metadata, and it's indeed a problem.

There is also not-metadata data that WhatsApp stores (group names, status updates, ...). But I think the point is that if you're using WhatsApp (especially group chats), there is a high chance that Facebook, Google AND Apple end up storing your personal data - even if Facebook might not have access to message contents (but Google and Apple still do). Still your data is all over the place. Doesn't matter if you disabled cloud backups because the people you chat with most likely didn't. With Telegram your data is stored on their servers - but but only on their servers.

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