The creator of Telegram Pavel Durov wrote a great post in which he harshly criticized the WhatsApp messenger and the “empire” of Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook / WhatsApp / Instagram).
In his channel in Telegram, where Durov shared a link to growth, he wrote that he didn’t like to “concentrate on competitors”, but since people often ask him about WhatsApp, he decided to express his opinion.
We in Telegram must recognize our responsibility for shaping the future. It is either we or a monopolist of Facebook. It is either freedom and privacy, or greed and hypocrisy. Our team has been competing with Facebook for the past 13 years. We have already defeated them once on the social networking market in Eastern Europe. We will defeat them again on the global instant messenger market. We have to.
According to Durov, creating a secure messaging application in the US is not easy. For the week of work in the USA, the Telegram team in 2016 faced three attempts at invasion by the FBI.
Imagine how 10 years in these conditions can affect the activities of an American company.
Durov added that the FBI and other government agencies justify this in the fight against terrorism, but criminals and authoritarian regimes can also use backdoors, noting that in 2012, access to WhatsApp messages could be obtained not only by the authorities or hackers, but also by mobile operators or administrators of Wi-Fi points.
And although WhatsApp later added encryption, de facto it was a marketing ploy, and the keys to decrypt messages were available to at least several governments, including Russia.
When Telegram began to gain popularity, the founders of WhatsApp sold their company to Facebook and said that "confidentiality was in their DNA." If this is true, then it must be a sleeping or recessive gene.
Three years ago, WhatsApp announced that it had implemented end-to-end encryption, but, Durov writes, WhatsApp did not tell its users that when backing up messages are no longer protected by end-to-end encryption and can be accessed by hackers and law enforcement.
Brilliant marketing, and some naive people are serving their sentences in jail as a result.
At the end, Durov noted that most of the new messaging features first appear in Telegram, and then WhatsApp are copied to the smallest detail.
More recently, we witnessed a Facebook attempt to borrow the entire Telegram philosophy when Zuckerberg unexpectedly declared the importance of confidentiality, almost literally quoting the description of the Telegram application in his F8 speech.
It should be noted that in early 2018, Telegram held a closed ICO for its blockade platform Telegram Open Network (TON) , raising a record $ 1.7 billion. At the same time, Facebook banned the promotion of cryptocurrency and ICO, but apparently only to note later this ban and develop your own stablebcoin for your payment system .
Publication date 17/05/2019
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