Telegram is a popular – especially in the East – internet messenger. It bills itself as “encrypted”, “private”, and “secure”. One of its creators (and the CEO of the company that operates the service), Pavel Durov, has for years been suggesting, in a more or less direct manner, that other internet messenger services expose our conversations and endanger our privacy.
It’s a pretty crude, yet surprisingly effective strategy for distracting attention away from Telegram’s very real problems with security and privacy. And there are quite a few of those.