If I'm being charitable I could presume that they left them so as to not disrupt sting operations

You are 100% correct!

When governments are corrupt; rebellion is the same as criminal, because you are going against the government. That is the whole problem.

As a Russian he should know better anyone the difference between an Activist and a criminal is one phone call from the FSB

Criminals according to what standard ? In some countries, activism or sympathy with a cause is considered criminal behavior.

Exactly!

It is a slippery slope.

Even with services like Proton (big company in the privacy realm) etc, you can only fully trust yourself.

That's why documents are always client side encrypted before I send my data, to any cloud platform.

Criminals like Edward Snowden I guess

Justice he dicides on and can get away with.

Implementing an in-house encryption was raising eyebrows already back then. No e2ee as default was also a red flag since it gives users without proper knowledge a false sense of security.

There was some privacy centered linux group that used Telegram that I thought I needed to follow, but noped out when they required a real phone number.

I'm with you. If they're verifying the information request, as in vetting it to determine if there is actual criminal behavior going on i.e. pedos/money laundering/etc, then good. Hand them over to the authorities.

They state that they don't cater to corrupt governments or organizations - good.

Everyone here arguing against these things are throwing up major red flags. Didn't the CEO just go to court because he wasn't handing over information willy nilly? I would hope Signal and Proton would be doing the same things.

I know "security experts" from a top French bank who insisted on using telegram instead of signal. So even people who were supposed to stay informed about this stuff fell for the hype and marketing.

I don't think Russians actually thought that. Its just that if they publicly pointed out the issues with Telegram and publicly suggested better alternatives, bad things would happen to them.

I know you didn't directly say it but it's implied so I wanted to clarify.

telegram chat isn't E2E, the only E2E on the platform is secret chats, which is only available to mobile users of the platform and not enabled by default. It does have client-server encryption but, in the terms of privacy that is worthless if you don't trust the host (and it opens the host up to legal information requests as it has the capability of decrypting the messages)

noone expected this

There seems to be a gross misunderstanding of how everything works here. Any platform will need to provide data to authorities when "asked properly" - as in, receives an actual order from some enforcing body that has authority on the subject in question. No commercial company will fight the CIA in court to protect your data. The best you can hope for is that they minimize what kind of data they collect about you in the first place - in the case of E2EE, they will only have access to IPs and other metadata such as connection timestamps and nothing else. But all of the services you listed will collect at least IPs and most will do phone numbers as well. The only difference with Telegram is that they're transparent about it. You can either avoid using commercial platforms altogether, or use them in a way such that data retrieved from them will be useless. But believing that "Signal will never give my IP to law enforcement" is delusional.

Wire isn't that great. Definitely avoid email as it is riddled with problems that aren't easily fixable despite what the email companies tell you.

Simplex Chat, Signal or possibly Matrix

That's the privacy starter pack.

Mid level is Linux, DeGoogled pbone, and openwrt on the router

Make your fed work for you! You pay him a healthy wage for it 🐸

SimpleX

I've been calling this out for years.

And every time, some commenter goes, "Nu uh, look at their website bro! It's super private!"

In terms of end-to-end encryption I don't mind if they have my phone number or not, if it's done right.

Let's use signal for example, because honestly they do it pretty decently, the most information that you can obtain from signal in a data information request is the date and time that an account is created, and the last time the account went online.

Actual content such as the user's contact list, the people that user was talking with(including groups), and of course the messages that you sent are fully end to end encrypted meaning that signal does not have access to it meaning that they cannot give that information out in a data information request as they never had it in the first place.

The most that signal is able to confirm in a data information request, is yes this specific account ID has a signal account and this is the last time they went online.

Doesn’t signal allow signups without a phone now?

Also second SimpleX that the other person mentioned.