Ads are only coming to public channels were channel owners already publish ad messages. Signal is located in USA, so it's quite easy for NSA et al to pressure Signal to implement backdoors.

This comment is downvoted but as a person in the EU I can wholly agree with it. It's not that I never use american made/hosted products but it is definitely a consideration when making a choice. It's not that I don't like Americans, but your government and government agencies have verifiably proven that they don't care about the things I care about.

I mean haven't we learned time after time, leak after leak the EU countries just shove data on their own citizens over to the USA? I feel like you comment is ignoring decades of history.

Telegram is not a business in a sense that it didn’t have any intelligible business model prior to this ads thing (which is not even live yet and this HN thread is the first time I heard about it).

For more than 7 years since its launch, the slick app, servers that instantly synchronize non-secret chats, and basically unlimited file storage were provided for free to use. Really free, no ads, no paid services. If you think about the amount of money that it all cost, it’s _insane_. So it begs the question: are Telegram’s founders really that kind of people willing to donate hundreds of millions for people’s messaging privacy with an additional option of maybe returning some of these money 7 years later with ads, or Telegram is just an elaborate FSB honeypot?

I guess we’ll never know for sure, but I’m more cautious about services that offer too much for free, not too little.

So do you think Telegram owners should subsidise its maintenance which costs tens or hundreds millions $ per year?