I have always assumed that Telegram was a Russian op. Any doubts I had were resolved by this event. [0]
> Deputy Russian State Duma Speaker Vladislav Davankov said he had sent an appeal to Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov to seek Durov's release.
> "His arrest may be politically motivated and a tool to gain access to the personal information of Telegram users. This must not be allowed," the state-run RIA Novosti news agency quoted Davankov as saying.
Wikipedia says that the same member of Duma was suggesting an idea to abolish homework at schools because his son asked for this when he learned that his father was elected. I would not treat him seriously.
"Vladislav Davankov" is a token "liberal". He's supposed to make such statements. Nothing that is uttered by Duma members is worth any consideration -- it's a complete theater.
That's how successful Telegram's PR has been. People believe - like you do - that it's end to end encrypted. It's not.
The secret chats presumably are (if you trust Telegram). Secret chats are 1 to 1. So anything outside of those that most people on Telegram access (massive channels and groups, smaller groups, private groups and channels) is NOT encrypted.
Sorry for whataboutism, but Apple does the same thing. It claims in advertising that all cloud backups are "encrypted", but if you dig deeper, "encrypted" means "encrypted with a key that is stored in the cloud" (see the table in [1]). Apple also (exactly like Telegram) requires you to opt-in for E2E encryption of backups, it is not enabled by default and even in this case contact list backup do not support E2E encryption.
The article claims that "Contacts and calendars are built on industry standards (CalDAV and CardDAV) that do not provide built-in support for end-to-end encryption." but it seems like a weak argument. Nobody actually cares what protocol is used between a device and a cloud.
There is a feature that can be enabled to create an end-to-end encrypted chat between strictly two users, but most people do not actually use it.
Telegram is largely a social network masquerading as a messaging app. There is a deep network of “channels” that interlink with each other to provide a community for users. None of that is encrypted.
Messages in groups are not E2E encrypted, especially in public groups where anyone can read them even without joining. However, anyone can report the message to moderators. The public groups are often limited (temporarily removed from search, temporarily or permanently banned) if they do too much violations.
> However, anyone can report the message to moderators.
Good luck with that. And that's a seriously big issue. Moderators (and "moderators" in Telegram mean an alleged team of people they hire to moderate all content in Telegram - if you report content, the group administrators won't even be notified about that so they can act by themselves first) in most cases won't do absolutely anything.
