Telegram's latency seems to be low when compared to WhatsApp(Although part of which could be optimised code, data center proximity should account more and if so how a supposed renegade group of techies with no revenue afford better data center facilities than their Billion$ competitors?).Of course likewise, if you start using Telegram today everyone who has your contact and uses Telegram will receive the notification be prepared for some awkward conversations with people whom you have forgotten. If you had stored a plumber number 10 years ago, you'll receive a notification telling that the plumber is on Telegram now. Telegram treats every single person on the contact list as your buddy and advertises it when they sign up by default.Į.g. and every time the same claims are being made. we are having this same argument every time signal's use of phone contacts is brought up. There is no reason, signal couldn't do the same. deltachat also provides a backup feature to export the local data including contacts and messages so you can restore them on another device. There is no technical problem to store contacts locally. and that's ignoring the problem with using phonenumbers. but if signal insists on storing its contacts in my general phone list then i won't be able to use it. I have not tried signal yet, mainly because it is not available on f-droid. and i don't want any chat contacts in my phone contact list. in fact i don't even have any contacts in my general phone contact list, because i don't call or send sms to people. So signal claims to protect my messages yet denies me privacy by insisting on making my contact list public where every other app can see it, just because they believe that most users are to dumb to back up their contacts?Įvery chat application that i have stores its own contact list. It is hard to say how Signal can improve upon these attacks other than to not use phone numbers at all. However, the research team shows that with new and optimized attack strategies, the low entropy of phone numbers enables attackers to deduce corresponding phone numbers from cryptographic hashes within milliseconds. More privacy-concerned messengers like Signal transfer only short cryptographic hash values of phone numbers or rely on trusted hardware. When the data is matched across social networks and public data sources, third parties can also build detailed profiles, for example to scam users. Tracking such data over time enables attackers to build accurate behavior models. Interestingly, 40% of Signal users, which can be assumed to be more privacy concerned in general, are also using WhatsApp, and every other of those Signal users has a public profile picture on WhatsApp. However, the paper does find that Telegram reveals to the world, in real time, exactly how many Telegram users have a particular phone number in their address book.Ĭan we change the title from the (click baiting) university press release to one which more accurately reflects the content of the paper?įrom TFA, here's the damning telegram bit:įor Telegram, the researchers found that its contact discovery service exposes sensitive information even about owners of phone numbers who are not registered with the service.įor Signal, TFA makes it clear that correlation defeats Signal's privacy measures: So Signal comes out excellently from this, yet is mentioned in the title. However, user name and avatar can only be decrypted if the user has consented to this explicitly for the user requesting the information and has exchanged at least one message with them. It is also possible to retrieve the encrypted profile picture of registered users through a separate API call,if they have set any. The only information available about registered users is their ability to receive voice and video calls. The Signal messenger is primarily focused on user privacy, and thus exposes almost no information about users through the contact discovery service. The associated paper summarises the information revealed by Signal succinctly:
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