- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
What do you think of this from privacy POV?
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They could just stop requiring phone numbers, which would be a lot more privacy friendly.
But unfortunately it would make spamming much easier
It’s doing an absolutely terrible job of stopping spammers.
Isn’t that an inherent fault of Telegram though?
I use SimpleX, and unless I join one of the large discussion groups there cannot be any spam. You cannot just join anything except open groups. If you spam you get booted by whoever started the group.
Terrible, of course. Especially since they are aiming the service to improve sign-up reliability in countries that block telegram, acting as a relay exposes yourself. Carriers in China (where I live) and other questionable countries are actively snooping around, and since SMS are generally unencrypted, the simplest heuristic would figure out what you’re involved in and start a very serious investigation.
On top of that, phone numbers in many countries are also unique logins to a number of services (again, here in China you need it for literally everything, it’s THE number one digital footprint), and attackers could use the information for bruteforce/wordlist attacks on known services, or use them for social engineering.
As much as I like the idea of helping others sign up who don’t have the means to acquire a foreign phone number, I would never willingly commit to that.
Especially since they are aiming the service to improve sign-up reliability in countries that block telegram
It’s mainly to offload the cost of sending verification codes via sms to users, which is one of the costs that Telegram wants to cut. As far as I remember, it amounts to, like, 7% of all their annual expenses (I will source this later). A couple of years ago they decided not to send sms verification codes when you sign in from a third-party app, and just send the code to active session. This sounds like recipe for moderation headaches and privacy disasters, but also good way to boost their premium metrics :)
At least it’s opt in. But fucking hell, that’s a horrible idea
Such feature should never be in a consumer IMS because it can be activated accidentally. If you want to let your users become relays, do it at least like the registration for Ubuntu Pro
