Are you looking to leave the Facebook-owned private messaging app WhatsApp?
You’re not alone. Following a since delayed and confusing terms of service update that will allow WhatsApp to share your data with its parent company, privacy-concerned users are looking for alternatives.
Enter Telegram.
Telegram has been around since 2013, but it's currently having a moment. In the wake of the WhatsApp controversy, the company, which pushes itself as a privacy-focused service that provides both one-on-one secure messaging as well as more social features like group chats, shared that it had gained 25 million users over a 72-hour period in mid-January. The service says it now has 500 million active users.
Telegram is often grouped with Signal, another messaging app popular among those looking for a secure messaging solution.
But what is Telegram? How does it compare to WhatsApp and Signal? And how much should you be concerned by its previous controversies involving terrorists, far-right extremists, and revenge porn distributors? Let’s take a look.
Who owns Telegram?
Telegram is owned by the same two people who founded the company in Russia back in 2013, Pavel Durov and his brother Nikolai. Pavel is also the company’s CEO.
Pavel Durov has been dubbed Russia’s Mark Zuckerberg, as he had originally founded that country’s biggest social networking site, known as VK. The company made him a billionaire.
While VK still exists, Pavel completely cut ties with the social platform he founded in 2014. VK had been known for fighting back against Kremlin censorship. Then allies of Russian President Vladmir Putin and the Kremlin consolidated their shares in the company in order to take an ownership stake. Pavel was forced out of his role, sold his remaining shares, and left Russia for Germany. According to Pavel, he was pushed out for refusing to provide VK user data to the Russian government or shut down a group for anti-corruption advocate and opposition leader Alexei Navalny that ran on the social network.
Telegram is Pavel’s continuation of the online free-speech efforts that started with VK. The company is registered in the U.S. as an LLC. The team has moved around since its inception and was last reported to be located in Dubai.
Is the Telegram app secure?
Telegram’s current boost in popularity is coming from users looking for a more secure messaging app. The company makes a point of accentuating its focus on privacy. Interestingly, though, Telegram has a shaky history when it comes to that.
Unlike other secure messaging app options, Telegram does not have end-to-end encryption on by default. End-to-end encryption ensures that only the parties involved in the communication, i.e., the sender and receiver, can read the messages. Even the messaging app that hosts the servers where these messages are stored cannot read them.
In order to activate end-to-end encryption on Telegram, you must make your chats “secret.” And you need to do this one by one with each of your contacts.
However, even then, not all of Telegram’s messaging features are end-to-end encrypted. One of Telegram’s most popular features is its group chats. Those are not end-to-end encrypted. Neither are messages sent to you by those who aren’t on your contacts list whom you’ve yet to turn end-to-end encryption on for.
Telegram controversies
Telegram’s unique combination of private messaging and social networking features have been attractive to certain types of users. Plus, the app has very lax content moderation in order to boost its privacy-focused bona fides, which is also appealing to those users.
Unfortunately, some of those users are extremists. The messaging app has had a history of problems with foreign terrorists using the app. Telegram was once a major online propaganda tool for groups like ISIS, although the company has cracked down on that over the past few years.
Meanwhile, neo-Nazis and white supremacists have continued to proliferate on the platform, using it as a recruitment tool. Far-right personalities like Milo Yiannopoulos and Laura Loomer, who have been banned from more mainstream social media platforms, have found a home on Telegram. Most recently, Telegram has become a major hub for believers in the far right QAnon conspiracy following Parler’s takedown.
As Mashable has previously reported, Telegram also has a massive revenge porn problem, with users freely sharing nonconsensual pornographic images on the platform.
Telegram has removed certain public group channels before. Most recently, the company purged a few neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups spreading hate. However, Telegram is known for its loose moderation. Also, the company itself can't view those private end-to-end encrypted chats.
Telegram's many controversies have even led to a lawsuit... against Apple, which was recently sued in an attempt to have the iPhone-maker remove the Telegram app from its App Store over the same reason it removed Parler: extremist content.
What's the difference between Telegram and WhatsApp?
Odds are good that if you’re looking into Telegram as your new messenger app of choice, you’re fleeing WhatsApp.
In 2014, Facebook announced that it was buying the popular messaging app WhatsApp. Since then, the social media giant has mostly treated WhatsApp as a separate entity from its social networking platform.
That all changed in early 2021 when WhatsApp updated its terms of service to inform users that their data would now be shared with its parent company, Facebook. Many users were outraged. But it turns out to be a much more nuanced change than people originally believed it to be.
In fact, when you send WhatsApp messages to friends and family, they remain end-to-end encrypted by default. It's actually only messages with some businesses that may not be end-to-end encrypted, depending on what third-party access they've enabled for hosting services. The app will warn you what privacy level you can expect on any given message via color-coded alerts at the top of your message.
While WhatsApp tried to clarify these changes after the initial uproar, users who already distrusted Facebook wouldn't be convinced. The magnitude of the WhatsApp exodus is unclear, but as competitors like Signal and Telegram flew to the top of the App Store charts, WhatsApp completely dropped out of the top 20 apps.
Many of these security-conscience users seem to have landed on Telegram. Ironically enough, if security is first on your mind, WhatsApp is the better choice. WhatsApp messages, with only a few exceptions, are end-to-end encrypted by default — and that includes group chats. Telegram users, on the other hand, have to choose the "secret chat" option to get end-to-end encryption, and those messages can only be between two people. So there's no way to have end-to-end encrypted group chats.
Telegram, in some ways, functions like a social network even more so than WhatsApp, the messaging service run by a social network. Users on Telegram can choose a username along with the required phone number registration, while WhatsApp and other messengers tie your identity to your phone number. Telegram can also host up to 200,000 users in a single group chat. On WhatsApp, the group chat limit is 256 people.
In terms of data privacy, many people were upset by the idea of WhatsApp starting to share data with Facebook. But, in fact, that has already been happening for years. The issue at hand is metadata — things like your location, who you're talking to, and more — not the content of specific messages.
Nevertheless, metadata can tell you a lot about a user and it's not insignificant in terms of privacy concerns. Thus it's important to note that Telegram collects the very same type of metadata that WhatsApp does. What's more, the content of unencrypted messages are also stored on their servers, which is not the case with most messages on WhatsApp, which are end-to-end encrypted by default.
When it comes to choosing between Telegram and WhatsApp, here's what you want to consider: If you’re looking for a messaging service that will collect less of your data, choose WhatsApp. If you’re looking for a messaging app that’s less likely to use that data in some way, Telegram is your choice. Telegram has previously gone on the record saying they have no interest in selling the company or serving users advertising, hence, your data is least likely to land in the hands of third-party organizations.
Related Video: Why Signal is the messaging app everyone is talking about
OK, but what about Telegram vs. Signal?
If you’re looking for a truly secure messaging alternative to WhatsApp, go with Signal instead of Telegram.
Signal is, hands down, the most secure of these messaging platforms. Messages are end-to-end encrypted out of the box. Users can even set messages to disappear after a certain amount of time.
Another major plus when it comes to security is how little data Signal collects from you. All you provide Signal with is a phone number. Signal is even working on a system that wouldn’t require providing them with your phone number and would instead involve storing user identities securely on their servers. The Signal app is free and open-source software.
In the past, the FBI has subpoenaed Signal for information about a user. The only data the company was able to offer was the user’s account creation date and last time they logged on. That’s how little Signal collects.
Signal is really meant for one-on-one communication with people you know, though you can create group chats with up to 1,000 participants. However, if a user would like a more social network-esque messaging app, that’s when they’d go with Telegram. Just remember, those Telegram group chats aren't end-to-end encrypted.
Where to download Telegram
If you’re looking to download Telegram, you can go to Telegram.org for the desktop versions of the app for Mac and PC. The mobile versions of the Telegram app can be found on Apple’s App Store for the iPhone and iPad and on Google Play for Android.
UPDATE: Jan. 28, 2021, 11:59 a.m. CST This article was updated to clarify the specifics of WhatsApp's terms of service changes and the types of data the apps collect.
Topics Cybersecurity
