Point is so that you might accidentally click on some F2P crap over there and actually spend more money than you would have otherwise. Bonus points if it’s Fortnite. They love filling it with so much confetti and showing off. Brings a lot of money.

It doesn’t work like that. Encrypted messages will not become unreadable for other clients. They will become undecryptable for users of other clients.

No, I’m not saying that.

First time I read about such thing being included in TOS. Care to link something relevant? I can’t imagine how they are going to control that or ban any client or wipe data transmitted by them.

No, my argument is “this argument about a gun being used is invalid. It’s not used for now”.

I’m pretty sure if there would be enough demand for strong encryption there would be OTR forks of Telegram that would become popular. There is no such thing now. People use Telegram for stuff that is not “1on1 talks that I want to be strongly protected” in overwhelming majority of cases. People choose convenience. Encryption is useless when you are getting reported on by people in your chats or when you don’t know what you’re doing. Stupidity breaks any encryption, see that latest Signal case.

I’m Russian, have a good knowledge about protest activity. Amount of people being unlawfully arrested, prosecuted, and jailed, is abnormally big. Yet, with this amount of cases you’d guess there will be at least some links or evidence of Telegram being a career, or a link that allowed to find certain users and arrest them. Such a case would be a huge deal for a lot of people. There is no such case as far as I’m aware.

Telegram is a platform that is used by both prey and a hunter. It doesn’t actively try to protect the prey. It does contain abilities that one could utilize to protect themselves. But it certainly does not help the hunter. Hunter can try to utilize various tools that would use Telegram, and help them get the data on the prey. But that data would not be exclusive. It won’t be a result of Telegram saying “we got your request for this user, here is the data that they hide, enjoy”. It would be a public data from public chats, or data that has been manufactured using social engineering. Telegram is not a side in this process, it’s a field.

There are other platforms that really provide data (private data, or data not easily reachable) by request from authorities, we know it and avoid them. That would be VK. It was created by Durov, but now it’s operated by authorities basically.

So when I see stuff like “owner of Telegram servers had some links to FSB”, “someone could get your data if they monitor your traffic” etc., it doesn’t strike me. Those have nothing to do with the “Telegram shares your data with authorities” narrative, which remains unproven. Durov is a creator of VK that now haunts on Russians, he is not a genius I would like him to be. But Telegram administration doesn’t seem to share the data I want to keep secret with anyone, for now.

Yeah. Prisoners, on the other hand…

not encrypted by default

Not e2e encrypted ≠ not encrypted.

its closed

Client is open source and you can use your own client with custom functionality if you like. I imagine nothing stops anyone from adding their own e2e implementations on top of it.