Alright, what's up guys? I want to clear up a misconception that I've been seeing all over the place recently, because I know a lot of you guys watching my channel, you have this misconception too, and I want to, you just, I don't know. It's one of those things that's about deceptive marketing, I suppose. It's about the application Telegram. Telegram, if you don't know, it is a messaging application that can run on your phone, it can run on your computer, it, a lot of people I know use it in place of having text messages, and it's, the thing about it is, I'll go ahead and have the punchline up front, and that is Telegram builds itself as being a secure messaging application. It's really not really any more secure than if you were using AOL chat over HTTPS, okay? Which really means any kind of, you know, chat service out there, telegrams, no more secure than any of them. Here's the problem, here's the thing with Telegram. And I'm not going to knock Telegram, but actually I'm going to knock Telegram. So let's be clear. Telegram will advertise themselves as being encrypted. Oh, we have an encrypted messaging service, and it's secure, and it's private, and blah, blah, blah, and that's what it's build at. Build as, it's build as, oh well, don't use text messages because they're not secure, use us instead, okay? And yeah, text messages, I wouldn't trust them either. There's a lot of, unless you're using signal or one of those actual end-to-end encryption services, in general, they're not trustworthy, but Telegram is no better. And this is what I mean. Telegram, first off, is encrypted in a highly trivial sense. That is, it is encrypted in the same way that every website with HTTPS is encrypted, basically. That is, your message is encrypted on its way to Telegram servers. It's also encrypted on the way from Telegram servers to its recipient. Let's say I send a message to Billy. Now, if you're an actual privacy concerned person, or just someone who doesn't want constant metadata being mined off you or something like that, you sort of expect, oh, if I'm using a secure messaging application, if I'm using encrypted, blah, blah, blah services, I expect no one except for me and my recipient to be able to read my message. Telegram does not work like that because although it is encrypted on the way to Telegram servers and the way on Telegram servers from them to your recipient, Telegram can manifestly read your messages. They have the keys and they openly have the keys to read any messages on their platform. That means individual messages, that means group messages, that means your pictures, that means your phone number, which you gave to Telegram when you signed up, that means all of that stuff. It is not a secret. It is, you know, they can read it as easily as AOL could read AOL messages. Okay. And they don't pretend to hide that. Now, Telegram does have a particular mode, like a privacy mode, like a private chatter. I forget exactly what they're called, which is a one-to-one thing that you can have with one other person. And that could be a legitimate into end encryption, but in most cases, and for all group chats, no Telegram group chat is secure. The thing you need to remember about that, like the, not any of that stuff can be read by Telegram. And there have been other services in the past. Mon, Discord is a good example because Discord, it's the same kind of concept as Telegram. Actually, basically, exactly the same, but its privacy is basically no better than Skype. That is, they have all your data. They can look at it whenever they want. They can do whatever they want. Discord in the past has doxed people. It is given people's information out. And not just people who are violating the law, people, they don't like people, you know, who have chats that they don't like, stuff like that. That is what Discord does. It's what it can do. And Telegram, it can just as easily do that. Now, I don't off the top of my head, no if Telegram has done something like that in the past, but don't assess danger that way. Assess danger in terms of potentiality. They have the ability to do it. And honestly, if you're using a service that is advertised as being encrypted secure, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, you would sort of think that this is what it would be general, like real into an encryption, but it's not. They are being deceptive in how they advertise themselves. Okay. So the other annoying thing about Telegram is that a lot of people will say, oh, Telegram is a free software application. It's a open source. It is all free software. You can download the Telegram messenger application. And it's all free software. So you don't have to worry about proprietary spyware, blah, blah, blah, not true. Absolutely not true. Now, it is a GPL. It has a GPL license. Now, if you look out there, you probably know that Telegram actually has a bad habit of releasing source code late for their binaries, which is highly suspicious, but let's just take their word for it and assume that they're being all nice and good. And that's the right source code and blah, blah, blah, blah. The thing is, if you have a free software application on your computer, Telegram, and your friend has a free software application on their computer, also Telegram, it actually doesn't make a lick of difference because that Telegram is entirely centralized in Telegram that is your free software application is sending your encrypted quote unquote message to a server that runs a proprietary server side variant of Telegram, which is not open source to be clear, which has the ability to decrypt anything. It can do anything at once. And so it's just as if you were running that on your computer. That's basically how it is. So just because you and your friend might be running free software, where applications that are blah, blah, blah, encryption, all of that kind of stuff, there are more variables at play. You have to think about how your data is being actually used. Now, this is one of the reasons I think people should be just generally suspicious, one of advertising. I mean, Telegram, it's just annoys me particularly because there are a lot of other, you know, let's say like WhatsApp or whatever that normies use. That is a blatant spyware program. They just openly, yeah, it's proprietary. We look at all your stuff, whatever. But the thing is Telegram is not necessarily any different. It builds itself as being, oh, privacy and security and encryption and all that kind of stuff. And it has a free software client side application, but that doesn't really change anything. It's just as liable for them to look at what you're doing on your computer, what messages that you're sending and stuff like that. So that's the thing that sort of annoys me about Telegram. Now, I actually have Telegram installed on one of my computers. I use it some people in my social circle, use Telegram, so I'll have it. But if you are under any illusion that your messages are secure, they're just not. If you want to send secure messages, talk to someone in real life, that would be the best thing. But you signal the SMS, the text message application, that's good into into encryption. And let's see what else, you know, send emails with your encrypted emails with your GPG pair or whatever. There are many other options for actually having secure communications. Telegram is just not it. Gotta tell you it's not it. And it's a good example of how you can sort of fool people by saying blah, blah for e-soft, where blah, blah, but it's nothing. Just don't trust them. Just don't trust people who talk about encryption. In fact, don't even trust yourself. Don't trust me saying this. I might just be making this up. You can't trust me either. Sorry coronavirus. Anyway, that's it. Yeah, don't trust anyone, not even yourself. See you guys next time.