Reminder that Telegram sucks and you should start using other platforms immediately
β οΈ Telegram is not a secure and private messenger: it's a marketing scam used by a lying billionaire to make more money.
Here are some examples of why Telegram is not secure nor private and doesn't keep you safe from big companies, oppressive governments and malicious users
β’ Telegram does not implement end-to-end encryption in regular chats. This means that Telegram Inc has the keys to decrypt all of your messages and can access them at any moment
β’ Telegram is not fully open source. Only the piece of software on your phone is: you don't know what happens once the data leaves your device, because the server-side code is closed source
β’ Durov is lying about his struggles with Russian authorities. (He's the Telegram CEO btw) Since he's started his misleading narrative about being exiled from Russia, 120 trips in and out of there have been documented, with some suspicious timings regarding Putin's government halting its struggle to ban Telegram
β’ It has been confirmed that Russian oligarchs close to Putin fund Telegram, implying very probable ties with the Kremlin
β’ Telegram gives your data to authorities. They have repeatedly collaborated with tribunals, police and interpol by handing the data of tens of thousands of users. A transparency report has been promised since 2016, but only in 2025 they started publishing them and they show hundreds of thousands of restrictions concerning controlled substances, alleged cybercrime/hacking and non-specified reasons ("other"), as well as hundreds of compliances to information requests just to EU authorities for the same reasons. At a time when institutions are getting more and more oppressive, the indiscriminate collaboration with law enforcement can only lead to dark paths. We've seen what happened with Elon Musk at Twitter, who is gonna stop Durov if he goes full Elmo and helps right wing governments crack down on oppositions?
β’ Telegram hands user data even for copyright infringment and piracy
β’ Telegram enforces region-based censorship according to local laws
β’ Telegram is getting unusable for free users. Ads (often for crypto-scams and ai-generated slop) and premium features/prompts are covering more and more screen space, making Telegram insufferable to use for free users without heavily modified clients.
β’ Premium is a scam. While it was advertised as the only way to economically sustain Telegram, the truth is that the money is going to Durov's pockets, grown from 11 billion dollars in 2023 to 17 billion in 2025. Stop giving your money to billionaires.
β’ Telegram doesn't care about privacy at all: their priority is making money. The asymmetry of usability and features between free and premium users isn't limited to fancy gimmicks: some privacy options are paywalled as well, like restricting who can send you messages and voice messages, and writing messages as a public channel instead of using your personal account (which used to be a free feature btw).
β’ Premium membership intentionally weaken users' privacy. The option to restrict who can send you messages doesn't affect premium users, making it easy for stalkers to circumvent it by making multiple VoIP (sim-less numbers) accounts with just one premium subscription.
β’ Many "privacy" features do not work as advertised, like the "Restrict saving content" option which doesn't actually restrict anything, since pictures are downloaded and stored unencrypted in a folder on your device.
β’ Telegram feeds your long messages to LLMs for summaries, and there is no opt-out.
β’ Privacy and security experts unanimously consider Telegram less private and secure than any competitor (Signal, Simplex, Threema, Wire, Session, Cwtch, XMPP+OMEMO and even Matrix/Element are better)
βΌοΈ TL;DR Telegram is not a secure and private messenger: it's a marketing scam used by a lying billionaire to make more money. You should move away from this platforms
