Why is this interview happening inside a sauna?

Dude for the first 15s I thought this is porn

It's also important to continue educating people about the fact that Signal is incredibly problematic as well, but not in the way most people think.

The issue with Signal is that your phone number is metadata. And people who think metadata is "just" data or that cross-referencing is some kind of sci-fi nonsense, are fundamentally misunderstanding how modern surveillance works.

By requiring phone numbers, Signal, despite its good encryption, inherently builds a social graph. The server operators, or anyone who gets that data, can see a map of who is talking to whom. The content is secure, but the connections are not.

Being able to map out who talks to whom is incredibly valuable. A three-letter agency can take the map of connections and overlay it with all the other data they vacuum up from other sources, such as location data, purchase histories, social media activity. If you become a "person of interest" for any reason, they instantly have your entire social circle mapped out.

Worse, the act of seeking out encrypted communication is itself a red flag. It's a perfect filter: "Show me everyone paranoid enough to use crypto." You're basically raising your hand.

So, in a twisted way, Signal being a tool for private conversations, makes it a perfect machine for mapping associations and identifying targets. The fact that Signal is operated centrally with the server located in the US, and it's being developed by people with connections to US intelligence while being constantly pushed as the best solution for private communication should give everyone a pause.

The kicker is that thanks to gag orders, companies are legally forbidden from telling you if the feds come knocking for this data. So even if Signal's intentions are pure, we'd never know how the data it collects is being used. The potential for abuse is baked right into the phone-number requirement.

Remember how Telegram said they would stop providing Chinese authorities with user data during the Hong Kong protests. Implying that they were doing it at some stage.

Also remember how the FBI have said in several leaked documents they hate signal because the only data they get is when the user signed up and the last time they were online, nothing else.

Which app would you rather use?

I've been saying this for years. Telegram is a social media app.

Why are they sitting in a sauna?

As much as I'd like to favor foss and federated messenger apps, telegram isn't as much garbage as whatsapp:

1.The client is somewhat open source and have forks like Forkgram, Materialgram and unoffical clients like Telegrand.
2. Telegram isn't E2EE by default but at least it doesn't lie about it and have E2EE secret chat when nessesary, that means crucial chats stay on your device and the rest stay on their database recoverable and syncable across devices.
(Yes, whatsapp supposedly is E2EE but we can't know for sure, it's closed-source.)
3. You can use telegram as a cloud service with only 2GB per file limit, unlike whatsapp.
(There's even a third-party app that utilise this as a cloud gallery.)
4. Even tho telegram has ads in large channels, telegram isn't funded by a greedy big-corp and it doesn't datamine you, ads are based on the channel's topic.

Yes, in terms of privacy, telegram isn't the best option, Signal, Session, XMPP, Matrix, or SimpleX have better privacy features, less linkability and E2EE by default but telegram is very mainstream and got more publicity, making it the whatsapp alternative it advertises itself as-is.
Publicity doesn't make a better messenger app, but for what it tries to do, it's adoptable for simple users, doubles as cloud storage and is more secure than the garbage being whatsapp.

Immigrating users to different apps is a headache on it's own, but if they know of telegram and it's not privacy invasive, that's not bad.

pro tip: there is no such thing as a fully private app or communications channel unless you are face to face with someone and in a Cone of Silence(tm).

What is not mentioned... there's no privacy when the device itself is compromised. For instance, Android phones can read and phone home data from your notifications. In that case, any messenger app wouldn't be private from Google's eyes.

And WhatsApp is worse. It fails to include a libre software license text file. We do not control it. It is never secure.

They've done a really amazing job of convincing the world that this is an encrypted messaging app.

This is a play on people's naivety. It is an encrypted messaging app in as much as regular messages are encrypted between the client and the server. It's just that this achieves nothing for the user in terms of privacy unless you can both completely trust the provider (you shouldn't) and be confident that the back-end can't be compromised (you can't).

They do also have "secret chats" that are apparently E2E encrypted, but you'd be mad at this point to give them the benefit of the doubt without at least looking at independent security audits of the client.

Where I am, Telegram is mainly used by alt- and far right figures close to Russia. Facts don't matter in these circles any more. Feelings do. And Durov knows how to manage those.

When you build a backdoor into your "encrypted messenger" its just a surveillance app

The body language in this video is wild.

That's absurd coming from the founder of a FOSS messaging app who actively decided not to let Signal federate and rejected any other open source Signal client. Not only that, even now you can't truly use Signal's new "username" feature. If any of the recipients have your number stored in their phonebook, irrespective of whether you know them or not, the username goes for a toss. This was/is the problem with Telegram's username feature. Signal knew this and still decided to go ahead with it. Not to mention never doing anything about completely removing the phone number from the account after its creation. This has been, by design, a privacy and hence safety threat, and even after the username feature was implemented, this not getting implemented is very concerning.

Pretty sure signal is not the best option, but telegram should be avoided at all costs.

Unlike Signal, Telegram is successful in getting people to move away from Meta's Whatsapp.

SimpleX is the most private of the big three. No phone number or account needed. Able to self host.