By default, if you stop using Telegram and do not come online for at least 18 months, your account will be deleted along with all messages, media, contacts and every other piece of data you store in the Telegram cloud. You can go to Settings to change the exact period after which your inactive account will self-destruct.
Which is not true, there is a lot of messages from Deleted Account. The statement is completely misleading. Maybe the rule is applied to some users and is not to others? How does it work?
Moreover, Telegram does not delete contacts. Well-known issue Telegram automagically adds new contacts which are not in the contact list of my DES · Issue #3766 · telegramdesktop/tdesktop · GitHub. I experience it myself, I occasionally see John Doe joined Telegram, but I don’t know the guy. Probably, the root cause is that I rented the SIM card online just to create a new account, and the phone number was previously rented by somebody else, and the previous owner shared his contact list to Telegram. Telegram keeps associating the phone number to the contact list despite the fact the account was deleted and a new one signed up.
I know Telegram is not a privacy-oriented messenger, but I expect them to follow their own rules.
I treat Telegram more like social media with their chat groups, which are both terrible privacy and security wise but probably the 2nd best implemented chat group out there (i hate that Discord is probably still the best even though it is enshittifying really hard right now)
Discord is…
Man I love the communities and it’s nice that Voice chats are getting E2EE, but yeah, plain text DMs (not that telegram is any better than this, but at least it has E2EE in the form of secret chats, even if probably a bad one), Video Ads being shoved, not making proper report system (outside of DSA but that’s like I guess basic and like the DSA report form, what should have been in the report system function), lack of option of deleting all messages when deleting an account, Discord not caring about moderating enough. It’s just bad, makes me glad I gave up on it.
Not to mention, I do appreciate some of the people who take privacy seriously but the ones I would mostly communicate, nadah so.
Either way I don’t care, had to give it up for life reasons. (there’s also my mental health needing to be much healthier now in the adulthood).