Telegram Says It Will Provide User Data to Authorities

Telegram updated its privacy policy on Monday to say that the company will provide user data, such as IP addresses and phone numbers, to law enforcement agencies in response to a valid legal order.

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That was to be expected.

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Yes it is expected, and base on its TOS, I think ALL activists inside autocratic countries should change TG registration phone number to a burner number (if not already!?) ,delete all posts and delete account immediately.

Yet the way TG works leave too many footprints in the server, and there is a possibility that they wont really delete your account (because you can still check the UserID of that deleted user, and all related messages), they might just MARK DELETE.

This is very sad.

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Surprised it took them this long to announce. IIRC, the day they succumbed to pressure from Iran, this was inevitable.

So what are some of the alternatives being used in terms of news and information channels? To me Telegram’s value were its channels rather than it being a messaging platform.

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RSS feed

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What is this involving Telegram and Iran?

if you use telegram just to watch channels, then it is fine.

if you are kind of worried, then dont subscribe to those channels, just save the channel link in your own notes and visit as you please.

Telegram is dead, I read today that Telegram is starting to provide telephone numbers and IP addresses to the French authorities, which will be able to apply its censorship and continue its EU propaganda, this application is now to be avoided.

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Telegram was always an application to avoid.

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Maybe Matrix? It’s decentralised so it’s not possible for a central entity to shut down a server or chatroom. But I’m not sure if Matrix groups can actually be “channels”, as in, that only one person can post.

Messengers based on the Matrix protocol, like Element, were not taken into account because the federation leads to considerable privacy drawbacks. For example, messages and metadata are permanently stored on all involved servers, which means that every server operator is able to track who communicates with whom at what point in time. In the same vein, it’s evident for all server operators who the members of groups are, and the operator of a user’s home server is, in theory, even able to access their contact list.
for privacy, no.

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And now more than ever before.

True, but it was still a good platform that offered easy access to information channels that were censored elsewhere by certain states, so it was useful.
Now you can have your phone number and IP address given to the authorities just for being on a disturbing channel.
I haven’t been on Telegram for years, but still

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Maybe you could look into a solution for creating RSS feeds of Telegram channels. A quick search leads to a couple of pages that claim to do that. Depending on how they are implemented, it might allow you to get the channel content without being associated with that channel in any way

It is an absolute disaster to use Element/Matrix. Basic ability to delete a room or clear data is absurd. An admin has to write a script to do curl requests to loop through all messages to redact them.

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The main value of Telegram was the types of content and channels it had which are censored on most other apps. Telegram had technical inferiority but practically it had more content.

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Signal group can be used as channel. People just don’t want to use it.

Signal groups don’t even come close to Telegram channels in terms of flexibility and capabilities.

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It might be more appropriate to compare with whatsapp’s channel feature.