This weekend I attended FOSDEM, as I did for the past 4 years. As always, it was a great experience, even if most of the talks I attended were not so interesting.

One of the great things about these events, is to get together with other Free Software enthusiasts. One of them introduced me to the new kid on the block: Telegram. It is advertised as a free and secure replacement for WhatsApp, a mobile application I have been refusing to use for months, much to the anger of friends and family.

People use WhatsApp because it saves them money to send SMS-like messages to other people. Which in my mind does not make much sense, as I can use email or XMPP for that same purpose, without having to enter just another walled garden. Sadly, people nowadays are using email less and less, and think that it is easier to send a Facebook message (it is not), and XMPP has became a de-facto walled garden since Google betrayed its users by dropping federation.

WhatsApp has the advantage of having millions of users already inside their walled garden, like it happened with Facebook, MSN, or ICQ back in the day. Their success can possibly be attributed to the foolproof system it uses to discover contacts: it just sends your entire address book to their servers for matching against already registered users, which is in itself enough reason not to use it.

So, when I was told of a secure, free and open alternative, I was eager to try it out. I started by opening their website to see what it was about. There, I found the first signs that something was wrong: no mention of licenses, almost no technical detail of how the protocol works, or how security is achieved. Still, my friend wanted to talk to me, so I rushed to install it and accept a laundry list of permissions in Android.

That was a big mistake. The first thing the application did was to check my address book for contacts, without my permission or knowledge. I got greeted by being told that some of my contacts already have Telegram installed, and since then I keep getting notification that some more of my geek friends are installing it. So it is obvious that this company got all my records, breaking my privacy and security. This is enough for me to remove this piece of software from my phone, but it is not the end of the story.

When checking it in more detail I found several other problems. The supposed "secret chat" cannot be possibly secure, as there is no verification of the remote party. It "just works", who cares if there is a man in the middle or not. Supposedly it employs a peer-to-peer connection, but I haven't verified that.

On the other hand, the non-"secret" conversations are all routed to the main server. The client-to-server communication is supposedly encrypted, but it uses a home-made protocol (which everybody knows is a recipe for disaster), and the server has access to the cleartext of all your communications.

Then, browsing the website, I've found that this "open" and "free" offer does not even have all the source code released. In particular, the server code is not public, nor you can set up your own server. Of course, it does not have federation, so even with the server code you wouldn't be able to talk with your friends. It all depends on two men funding and maintaining the project, so when the funds run out, one can only expect that all the users will be left in the dark.

I think these arguments are enough to realise that Telegram is only marginally better than WhatsApp. It offers encryption at the transport layer, but you still are contributing to another walled garden, you are at the mercy of a company which does not have a funding plan, and the security practises range from weak to disturbing.

In closing, if you are going to compromise your privacy, give away all your contacts' information, and rely on a single company to keep in touch with people, you might as well go and use what everybody else is using.

Update: Even before submitting this post, I've found that some more qualified people has already dissected Telegram and concluded that it is basically snake oil. Please see this article. and proceed to uninstall Telegram.