

Recently, Telegram has added increased utility for their users by powering up their file-sharing capabilities. That shows a commitment to an ideal that we gladly support. One thing we like about Telegram is how they stood up to the Russian government and choose to leave the country when they were ordered to give up their secret keys to the Russian state. Two other things that we don’t like are that Telegram logs IP Addresses of people using the service, and that unlike other apps in this roundup, they don’t publish Transparency Reports.

If you do not communicate using a Secret Chat, the contents of your messages are accessible to Telegram. End-to-end encryption is supported, but only for Secret Chats. However, there are some things we don’t like with regard to privacy and security. They also offer native apps for all major desktop and mobile operating systems. Another nice touch is the ability to “ unsend” messages, deleting them from your device and that of the recipient. Telegram offers a lot of the most useful privacy features, such as 2FA and secret chats with self-destructing messages.

Does not use Perfect Forward Secrecy (PFS).E2E encryption is not active by default.
