> Telegram also has a large amount of users in countries with heavy censorship and surveillance
That citizens of those countries are allowed to use Telegram says something about the privacy it affords to them.
That citizens of those countries are allowed to use Telegram says something about the privacy it affords to them.
Similar things happened in other non-free coutries as well.
Unless there's legal protections, assume in your threat model any company has let their host government, maybe others, backdoor their offerings. It might have been willingly or forced. Police states like U.S. and Russia should be assumed to subvert any pprovider.
If they don't like that, they need to repeal the Patriot Act, ban requiring companies to attach black boxes to their internal systems, give companies immunity for publicly talking about court orders, require companies to disclose what data they give to the government, and let individuals know what was ordered after a period of time. Then, I might trust statements about what they do or don't share.
Also, if these bother you, try not to commit crimes.
That’s a wildly ignorant take, but it makes for a nice conspiracy theory if you make no effort at all to understand the legalities.
Different warrants authorise the collection and use of information for different purposes. FAA 702 warrants only authorise targeting non U.S. persons outside the United States for foreign intelligence purposes, where there is probable cause to believe the U.S. person is a foreign power or is an officer, employee, or agent of a foreign power.
The FBI has criminal investigation and counterterrorism functions which relate to persons in the U.S. and/or where there is no connection to a foreign power. They obviously need different warrants to authorize those activities.
For example, they use a different meaning for the Word "collect." Instead of interception and storage of data, collect means an analyst looked at it. So, they technically weren't collecting U.S. citizens' data if analysts hadn't looked at that specific data yet. Technically... based on a strange definition of collect.
They originally also said this was limited to terrorism. Later, data showed they were looking at many more crimes. They were also passing the data onto many agencies. They were told to use "parallel construction" to deceive people about how they got that data.
Finally, BULLRUN and ECI-classified level showed they were weakening U.S. security standards, but pretending to strengthen them, so they could attack U.S. systems in secret at any time. Per "Core Secrets," they were also having U.S. companies give them backdoor the FBI could "compel" them to make (somehow).
With all that, they were caught lying under oath repeatedly. They got criminal immunity for that, too. I don't believe one word they say at this point. I also assume they're doing the same things they repeatedly lied about before and for which they can't be prosecuted.
Also Telegram banned or shadowbanned serveral protest channels / bots during elections and when war began.
Signal isn't E2EE, given the security blunder in which private images from your gallery were sent to random contacts (which indicates a scary state management situation in the apps, this isn't easy to do). E2EE implies that you purposely send content to specific people which is encrypted, not that your app sends potentially embarrassing or intimate pictures to your boss behind your back. That blunder is unforgivable.
Durov serves kremlin as much as any other company that operates in Russia.
You completely missing the point.
That just seems such a unreal claim. Telegram removed features like "people nearby" after its CEO was arrested in France. Who seriously believe that the kind of threats France establishment would employ on such a person could dwarf those of Russia establishment in term of bending the braves?