Which App Is More Safe: Telegram Or Whatsapp
Fellow Hong Kong online media and safety specialists Jason Li and Lokman Tsui have reopened an old evergreen debate that is not just standard right here in Asia’s self-proclaimed "World City," but also throughout the globe.
Which messenger is more secure and may be--with good conscience--really helpful to activists?
My place: No software can totally fill the privacy and security wants of activists. Anybody who needs to use a know-how as a software in their activism needs to understand how the expertise works, the way it suits with their personal threat model and whether the dangers the technology imposes are reasonable.
Suggesting a messenger for activists could be very completely different from recommending one for basic use. It's far easier to make a generalized and simplified recommendation to somebody whose risk mannequin doesn't embrace targeted surveillance, sophisticated hacking attempts or police custody in which officers threaten to use violence if passwords are usually not handed over.
For non-activist users, Whatsapp is probably an awesome choice. With out much clarification, chats, selfies and cat pictures are protected from mass surveillance with proper finish-to-finish encryption, and hurt from hackers is limited.
Whatsapp Has Solely Very Recently Added Encryption
Li and Tsui open their article with an anecdote in which activists recommend each other download Telegram, arguing it could be more safe than Whatsapp. Tsui and Li declare these activists "have been misleading protesters."
In 2014, years earlier than Whatsapp applied the Signal protocol to encrypt messages, telegram app chrome (click through the next webpage) was the only mainstream app that even offered finish-to-finish encryption, and as such was certainly not a bad recommendation. Whatsapp at this time was nonetheless routinely handing over chats to regulation enforcement, something professionaltesters feared might also happen in Hong Kong.
In 2016 though, as Li and Tsui preserve, it's Whatsapp that stands out for its encryption of all chats by default. Chats can no longer be topic to mass surveillance, and they can now not be handed over to the police by Whatsapp.
Context Is Important
Nevertheless, to understand which app finest suits the wants of a serious activist who would possibly find him or herself in the crosshairs of police and the courts, we have to look nearer at their risk model.
1) Proof
The first purpose of secret communications is to effectively set up a professionaltest without leaving evidence behind for a conviction in case the professionaltest is deemed "illegal" or gets out of hand. Chats are an necessary part of this evidence, and while the police may obtain these chats from Whatsapp or Telegram, in most cases they retrieve them from the suspect’s phone.
It’s not simple to say which application really offers better protection. Telegram permits users to ship messages that self-destruct after a specified amount of time, which is very nice if the police can get entry to your device. Telegram also means that you can set a lock with out which the app cannot be opened. Whatsapp then again makes it inconceivable to retrieve old chats on a new device (for example if a police officer removes your SIM card and accesses your account from a new phone). Whatsapp backups nonetheless might be found on the SD card or cloud storage.
It's misleading to say one utility is more secure than the other in this scenario. Security relies on the flexibility of the phone proprietor to encrypt their storage, handle backups and remain silent throughout an interrogation.