Why you should uninstall Telegram from your phone?
By Ishank Katyal
Telegram is a Dubai- based free messaging app and has 400 million users around the world. Telegram is indeed giving a tough rivalry to top messaging apps like WhatsApp and Messenger and also calls itself a “safer version of WhatsApp”. But is this application really safe for its users?
Here are the reasons that why this app is not safe for its users:
- Chats are not end-to-end encrypted:
End-to-end encryptions means is ensures that only sender and receiver of the message can read it, while other people interrupting the data see it as a string of meaningless characters.
WhatsApp is encrypting all your messages automatically since 2016 update.
You can encrypt the chats on Telegram only when you individually activate the “secret chat” option for each of your contacts.
- Telegram has access to your contacts and Metadata:
Before you use Telegram, you have to give the access of your contacts just like WhatsApp, where the app will automatically save all your contacts. But then there are the privacy issues. The app will give you the information of those who haven’t even signed up for the service.
- It has become home to RW extremists and conspiracy theorists:
Facebook, YouTube and Instagram couldn’t tolerate the right-wing extremists and conspiracy theorists, so Telegram has become home to such users of social media.
The platform currently hosts the people who denies COVID- 19 in Germany who often socialize with the proponents of other extremist technologies, like anti- Semites or QAnon followers.
Another report filed by German Child protection organization Jugenschutz analysed that 206 pieces of content found illegal under German Law, including Holocaust denial and spreading communal hatred. They found that Telegram has failed to remove 89 per cent of the reported content.
- Groups and Channels are not safe:
Groups and Channels in Telegram are easier to communicate with crowd as it has a plenty amount of cloud space for hundreds of users in the group chat.
But according to the business technology news site ZDNet, software engineers in Hong Kong protested and warned the users to not to use this app anymore because their data was not secure.
In fact, an online tutorial showed that how to extract information from Telegram groups and messages, including first and the last name of the users.
Conclusion:
Telegram is indeed one of the most successful social media apps but is simply a bad choice if you are looking for a safe chatting service. Signal, Theema are better alternatives, although none of them is perfect.