WhatsApp (or rather parent company Meta) is on the offensive – a few months ago Mark Zuckerberg claimed that “WhatsApp is much more secure than iMessage”, now another messaging app, Telegram, has been called out by Will Cathcart, the head of WhatsApp in Meta.
Cathcart cited a Wired article and his own criticisms of Telegram’s implementation of end-to-end encryption (E2EE). It hasn’t been independently verified, says Cathcart, and there are other shortcomings, such as it’s not enabled by default and E2EE isn’t available for group chats (because of the problems it would cause when backing up data, according to the Telegram itself).
Telegram isn’t end-to-end encrypted by default and doesn’t offer e2ee for groups. From the article: “Telegram has the ability to share almost any sensitive information a government requires”
— Will Cathcart (@wcathcart) February 10, 2023
The Telegram team has its criticisms of WhatsApp. For example, the option to back up your chats to Google Drive effectively disables encryption since the backups aren’t encrypted and government agencies can petition Google for the data instead of WhatsApp.
Naturally, both sides have an interest in arguing that their service is superior to the other. You can read Cathcart’s Discussion on Twitter for more details on his critique of Telegram. That Wired article is also worth reading, which chronicles several instances where Russian authorities appear to have access to secret Telegram chats. What’s more, Telegram’s faulty location API may have provided users’ locations up to a radius of around 3 km/2 miles. Telegram has reworked the API but may not have actually fixed the issue.
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