The eternal struggle between good and evil, if we want to call it that. WhatsApp e Telegram, the two messaging giants and two of the largest companies in the world, are in eternal conflict. We don't talk so much about users who use the services as about security and privacy. Since the dawn of time the question has been asked: which of the two is safer? While we have no answers, the head of the first company says concerned about the security of Telegram. Here are his words.
UPDATE AT THE END OF THE ARTICLE - 16/02/2023
But is WhatsApp safer than Telegram? This is the question that everyone is asking and which will never be answered. Their leaders battle it out
The CEO of WhatsApp Will cathcart issued a surprise statement criticizing Telegram for its data protection concerns. It is ironic that previously Pavel Durov, CEO of Telegram, has repeatedly made similar claims about the “green” application, accusing its developers of much the same. In an interview with Wired, Cathcart noted that Telegram, unlike WhatsApp, does not offer end-to-end E2EE encryption in chats and in conversations by default. While users have the ability to initiate a "secret" chat, the security protocol they use is not independently verified.
According to the head of WhatsApp, some enthusiasts have noticed a "strange" behavior of these chats, which could indicate the risk of data leakage without the user's knowledge. Another weak point of the application would be the work of the geolocation function. He stated that, until poco Once upon a time, it was possible to determine the location of any Telegram user within a radius of three kilometers if recently it allowed to track his geolocation.
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I Telegram spokesperson they were quick to say that the mention of E2EE as an advantage of WhatsApp can be seen as one marketing ploy. In the end, the application stores a backup copy of the correspondence in Google Drive, which makes encryption useless.
If a conversation with your WhatsApp contact is copied to Google Drive, the company has access to those messages, as does any government that requests this data from Google. So, E2E encryption is enabled in WhatsApp by default, but it is immediately disabled. And there's no way you can tell whether or not your friends are using these backups
On the other hand, Cathcart himself has admitted that using WhatsApp is not the best way to remain anonymous. For privacy conscious users, advised Signal, which he defined as "the most secure means of communication among all smartphone applications".
SECURITY UPDATE TRAINING
We have been contacted by a Telegram representative who has kindly disclosed that the above story is not true in any way. The claim that Telegram's encryption protocols have not been independently verified is false. Any researcher can independently verify Telegram's encryption integrity and implementation using its open source code, encryption protocol, and reproducible builds. In this regard, it must be recognized that a study by the University of Udine has already shed light on the matter (here the complete study).
The contact point also said that the news organization Wired omitted consciously certain aspects of the matter. Between these:
- how secret chats behave;
- the story that involved politics Marina Matsapulina;
- information poco accurate or erroneous about location access;
- the use of the Telegram API to control users;
- using the messaging platform to sell bonds to investors in 2020
In short, it seems that the story will continue and Wired will have a pretty bad time for not telling the whole truth.
