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[email protected] It gets a bit worse, Telegram has a long-standing relationship with a Saudi organization that's essentially a govt arm in Riyadh, working in direct partnership to analyze and monitor an obscene amount of user data: https://www.saudigazette.com.sa/article/641746/SAUDI-ARABIA/Etidal-Telegram-remove-over-16-million-extremist-contents-in-early-2024
They claim this only targets terrorist groups. I can verify that it absolutely impacts groups run by queer communities in the Gulf, because I was in one such group that was monitored and shut down by Etidal.
Telegram can fuck off into the sunset.
It never was secure.
I think a huge part of this “enshittification” thing is that companies have finally realized that normies for fucking real don’t care what specialists say, like at all, in no situation they care. Between a cryptographer with an ugly photo and a cryptobro with a nice photo they’ll listen to the latter.
10 years ago it was more of a compromise, now they realized that you can roll out something as “secure” as OSCAR over TLS to the server and say it’s secure and the absolute majority will just believe it if the advertising is good enough, no matter what specialists squeal.
So now people compare Signal to Telegram as if these were comparable.
It really sucks. Such a descent into stupidity and centralism together with AI poisoning just can’t avoid making our world more dystopian and genocidal.