A telegram review in terms of privacy and software freedom

Although my main communication method was and still is xmpp, I read a rather critical article about telegram in the Financial Times[1] and I felt that it is time to give it a try.

Being in trisquel's repos, means that the client is free software, although that is not the case with telegram's server [2].

The first bad experience came immediately, when at first launch the only way to create an account it, is by providing a mobile phone number.

Sharing my phone number with a software company is something I almost never do, but after much consideration I gave it a try.

And then, I had another bad experience. Instead of receiving an sms with an activation code in order to create an account, I received a message that the code was send to another device. As my computer was my only device that had telegram installed, I couldn’t receive such a code. Then I tried the following:
- Install telegram in my replicant device (both using f-droid and the apk from telegram’s official website)
- Install telegram client in another laptop
- Create a virtual machine with android x86 and install telegram using google play store (which was tricky because as I distrust Google, I needed to create a google account using a temporary e-mail address on tor network ).

All the above failed. I couldn’t create an account because I was getting the same message, that the code was send to another device.

I found somewhere [3] that the only way to create an account in telegram is by using an android phone with google app store. As I do not have such a device, I asked a colleague to install telegram on her device. During activation she entered my phone number and that is how I got an sms to create an account so I could finally use telegram in my computer.

To summarize, in order to use telegram you must provide the company with your mobile phone number, have a google account and download it using google play store. That means that in order to use it, you are forced to provide personal information AND use non-free software. All that to use a centralized server which we really don’t have any knowledge of whether it track it’s users or not. I believe that all this makes telegram status as free software really questionable.

[1] https://www.ft.com/content/c70ef7d6-230a-4404-b854-2e75fe0f2e0a
Completely irrelevant: there is an Icecat/Abrowser/Firefox addon called bypass paywalls clean (d)
[2] https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/Talk:Telegram
[3] https://github.com/telegramdesktop/tdesktop/issues/26626