WhatsApp calls out Telegram as it lacks encryption. The CEO of Meta, the company that owns WhatsApp, Mark Zuckerberg, asserted a few months ago that WhatsApp is more secure than iMessage. The CEO of WhatsApp at Meta, Will Cathcart, is now going up against Telegram.
To hear its founder tell it, Telegram was founded precisely to allow users to communicate in ways that skirt authoritarian surveillance.
Yet Russian authorities are wielding it as a powerful weapon against antiwar activists. How? https://t.co/uyRaAqS2V2
đź“ą: Irene Suosalo pic.twitter.com/sgB79HCHiF
— WIRED (@WIRED) February 2, 2023
WhatsApp calls out Telegram as it lacks encryption as Cathcart noted his personal complaints about Telegram’s end-to-end encryption (E2EE) implementation as well as a Wired piece.
Telegram is not end-to-end encrypted by default and offers no e2ee for groups. From the article: “Telegram has the capacity to share nearly any confidential information a government requests”
— Will Cathcart (@wcathcart) February 10, 2023
Cathcart asserts that Telegram’s E2EE implementation is flawed and has not been independently confirmed. Because of the problems, it would create when backing up data, for instance, it is not enabled by default and E2EE is not accessible for group chats, according to Telegram.
Team Blue, however, has its own complaints about Team Green as well. For instance, encryption is essentially removed when users back up chats to Google Drive because the backups are not encrypted, and government agencies can petition Google for the data instead of WhatsApp.
Both parties have an interest in claiming that their service is superior to the other. For more details on Cathcart’s critique of Telegram, you can read his Twitter thread above.
