WhatsApp (or quite father or mother firm Meta) is on the offensive – a couple of months in the past Mark Zuckerberg claimed that “WhatsApp is far more secure than iMessage”, now one other messaging app, Telegram, has been known as out by Will Cathcart, the top of WhatsApp at Meta.
Cathcart quoted an article by Wired and his personal criticism of Telegram’s end-to-end encryption (E2EE) implementation. It has not been independently verified, says Cathcart, and there are different flaws, e.g. it’s not enabled by default and E2EE isn’t accessible for group chats (due to the problems it might trigger when backing up your information, based on Telegram itself).
Telegram isn’t end-to-end encrypted by default and gives no e2ee for teams. From the article: “Telegram has the capability to share almost any confidential data a authorities requests”
— Will Cathcart (@wcathcart) February 10, 2023
The Telegram crew has its personal criticism of WhatsApp. For instance, the choice to again up chats to Google Drive successfully disables encryption because the backups are usually not encrypted and authorities companies can petition Google for the info as a substitute of WhatsApp.
In fact, each events have curiosity in claiming that their service is superior to the opposite. You may learn Cathcart’s Twitter thread for extra particulars on his critique of Telegram. That Wired article can be price a learn, it recounts a number of situations of Russian authorities seemingly gaining access to secret Telegram chats. There’s extra, Telegram’s flawed location API could have given away customers’ places all the way down to round a radius of 3km/2mi. Telegram reworked the API however could not have truly mounted the problem.