Signal vs Telegram for activist groups in Colombia, no contest

Helped set up a local human rights network in Cali and we tried Telegram for 3 weeks, the metadata leaks were insane compared to Signal's sealed sender setup. Has anyone else seen Telegram groups get compromised through phone number exposure?

2 comments

2 Comments

patricia_wells25d ago

Honestly, "the metadata leaks were insane" is exactly what I keep telling people but nobody listens until it's too late. We lost two contacts in our Medellín network because someone on Telegram scraped their phone numbers from group metadata and doxxed them on Twitter. Ngl, that sealed sender thing on Signal is the real deal, I've tested it with a packet sniffer and it's genuinely hard to trace. Telegram feels too loose for serious organizing, especially when you're dealing with government surveillance in Colombia.

gavinm8925d agoMost Upvoted

Yeah, that Telegram phone number scraping is a known attack vector (especially in Latin America where people are less careful about usernames). Even if you hide your number in settings, Telegram still stores it server-side which is the whole problem.