It took me like 5 seconds to get an answer for this with a search. Please don't posit wildly speculative scenarios in public forums.

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Article 1:

>How does Telegram make money?

>Telegram doesn’t make money, or at least it doesn’t generate revenues, as of 2019. Durov pointed out on a blog post that he “believes in fast and secure messaging that is also 100% free.”

>On the same blog, post, Telegram notes that if it were to run out of money, it might introduce “non-essential paid options” to supplement developers’ salaries.

Article 2:

>All the features that are currently free will stay free. We will add some new features for business teams or power users. Some of these features will require more resources and will be paid for by these premium users. Regular users will be able to keep enjoying Telegram – for free, forever.

>In addition to its messaging component, Telegram has a social networking dimension. Our massive public one-to-many channels can have millions of subscribers each and are more like Twitter feeds. In many markets the owners of such channels display ads to earn money, sometimes using third-party ad platforms. The ads they post look like regular messages, and are often intrusive. We will fix this by introducing our own Ad Platform for public one-to-many channels – one that is user-friendly, respects privacy and allows us to cover the costs of servers and traffic.

>If Telegram starts earning money, the community should also benefit. For example, If we monetize large public one-to-many channels via the Ad Platform, the owners of these channels will receive free traffic in proportion to their size. Or, if Telegram introduces premium stickers with additional expressive features, the artists who make stickers of this new type will also get a part of the profit. We want millions of Telegram-based creators and small businesses to thrive, enriching the experience of all our users.

so... they don't?

>Telegram doesn’t make money, or at least it doesn’t generate revenues, as of 2019. Durov pointed out on a blog post that he “believes in fast and secure messaging that is also 100% free.”

Durov might as well be paying lip service here. Telegram reserves the right to change its ToS. Facebook didn't spy on 100% of its users actions when it started. It was a picture rating service. The business model came after. Durov still has money left after he was forced out of VKontatke. He's in no rush to cash in. There's no telling when Telegram will be sold: it's not a non-profit and can be sold any moment.

I can understand philanthropy, but given how Durov has paid zero dollars over the past 8 years to cryptographers to design a protocol that ACTUALLY locks him out of terabytes of insanely valuable user data, I find it hard to believe his motives are pure.

With Moxie and Signal I can trivially say it's not a CIA front despite any money from Radio Free Asia, because I can check the end-to-end encryption works and protects every message. Given Durov's background in information warfare and disinformation, connections to Russia etc. and him having access to almost 100% of users' content and metadata, I can't say with confidence Telegram isn't an SVR (Russian NSA) front.

>I can check the end-to-end encryption works and protects every message.

You would be a fool and a poor spook if you created Signal as a honeypot and made it insecure from the get go to anyone looking. It would be made insecure either later on or by an extremely hard to find "bug". We know from Snowden that the NSA secretly weakens encryption products to make them vulnerable. All your case proves(?) is that Signal is a better made honeypot than Telegram if any of them are actually a trap.

"You would be a fool and a poor spook if you created Signal as a honeypot and made it insecure from the get go to anyone looking. It would be made insecure either later on or by an extremely hard to find "bug". We know from Snowden that the NSA secretly weakens encryption products to make them vulnerable. All your case proves(?) is that Signal is a better made honeypot than Telegram if any of them are actually a trap. "

You can't be serious. Anyone can show that vulnerability in the codebase. Signal has internal code review processes, and the git log is public. There is no better process out there, or if there is, you'll have to explain it. There is no perfect process but if you're trying to argue that justifies Telegram doing nothing wrt e.g. group chat end-to-end encryption, you're out of your mind.

Here's the thing: There's nothing that indicates Signal has a backdoor. OTOH, Telegram doesn't have to be converted into one, it ALREADY DOES IT. All that the NSAs of the world have to do, is hack the server. And since you're so intimately aware of Snowden's output, might I remind you of his SXSW talk from 2014 where he said NSA hacks systems all the time?

....then show your 'like' 5 seconds of results? * like - apart from grammatical comparisons, and 'to enjoy,', does it like mean anything anymore, er....innit?

Here's a source from TC. TL;DR Non-targeted ads in channels, which are like RSS feeds or blogs, no ads anywhere else. Also considering "premium" animated stickers:

> The service, which topped 400 million active users in April this year, will introduce its own ad platform for public one-to-many channels — “one that is user-friendly, respects privacy and allows us to cover the costs of server and traffic,” he wrote on his Telegram channel.

> “If we monetize large public one-to-many channels via the Ad Platform, the owners of these channels will receive free traffic in proportion to their size,” he wrote. Another way Telegram could monetize its service is through premium stickers with “additional expressive features,” he wrote. “The artists who make stickers of this new type will also get a part of the profit. We want millions of Telegram-based creators and small businesses to thrive, enriching the experience of all our users.”