 Tom here from Lauren systems. It is January 18th of 2021 the date matters because when I say things like a few days ago Signal had an outage. You want to know what date it is now the outage was interesting because basically What's that change your privacy settings though world started looking for something more? Privacy-oriented and Elon tweeted that signal was that solution and the world flocked to signal and signals said Oh, this is a lot of users and then their system crashed because that many people signing up at once was an Unexpected thing. They certainly weren't in communication with you on clearly to stage this properly therefore That outage brought people also asking me questions and lots of questions in my old signal video because a lot of comments saying Elon brought me here, which I thought was amusing But let's talk about telegram as well because the next problem that came up is people keep asking about telegram And I was critical of telegram a few years ago. I'm still two years later. Not a telegram user I'm still critical of the way they do things But I'm not saying not to use them and I bring that up because it's not like you can't use both of these applications One of the first challenges with applications like this and any of the messaging apps is Where are your friends and the people you want to communicate with? You can use signal and preach about it about how great it is But if you don't have friends using it, you're kind of lonely out there And you go back to whatever apps that you communicate with them on or become disconnected from them This challenge is what it is. I also bring this up because there's going to be a bunch of what abouts down below They're going to say tom. What about three mile? What about riot? What about matrix? What about rocket chat and the list will go on and on I don't use those my friends aren't on them. So I don't use them a lot I do bring up telegram though because of those apps I just mentioned telegram is by far your next tier down They're much bigger than signals far as I know have a massive user basin are quite popular And I know a lot of people that do use telegram not enough people that Are that fen diagram of circles of people that use signal people use telegram where I need to switch between those apps But I am aware of that app But I wanted to bring up a couple key fundamental differences because the comparison comes up quite a bit And there was this reddit post that I thought just did a great job of this to get us kicked off And let's expand to the whole thing right here And I'll leave a link to all this down below But signal and this was done with ios which actually has really nice privacy settings listings here Better than I could find in the way android lays this out But data not linked to you signal. They're not really well Tying data to you or really asking much in terms of permissions WhatsApp asked for quite a bit and of course for the privacy changes or what led to all this controversy Messenger which is facebook messenger is asking for well I think probably everything they possibly can maybe even Are asking as much as they can get away with then in telegram It's not near as invasive as these other ones But this is where I want to go back over to signal versus telegram Signal is a non-profit organization and that breaks that adage that people will Hammer out right away going well if you get something for free You must be the product and under the terms of surveillance capitalism as it's referred to Where companies monetize what they know about you to sell to advertisers which Not here to cast whether or not that's a good or bad thing people like free services and showing some ads As a business owner is sometimes targeting ads on facebook work rather well Leave the hate in the comments below for that. I want to raise awareness. That's what the most important part is And awareness starts with signal being an organization that runs on donations It runs on donations from a lot of security people Myself included in many of the people in my circles that I know that you signal We donate to this project because we believe in the fundamentals of the organization Which has a board of directors and by not collecting and not having and read my previous video or watch my previous video on signal Which I'll leave below, you know, they're very clear on their intentions of how they want to do things Now let's talk about facebook There's no question if you've spent any time on the internet and reading about facebook You know their intentions are a for-profit corporation that will monetize everything they can possibly know about you That is certainly their business model and they're very very skilled at it when they purchase whatsapp They claims remain that they wouldn't do that to whatsapp, but hey, that's not how facebook works That's not how facebook makes the money they make now. Let's get over here to telegram who do seem to have a fundamental grasp of privacy who seem to be a privacy oriented organization They do have an faq over here And uh, they talk about their privacy and everything else Then we have these statements from their founder, which is linked from their faq, but this is the part I really wanted to talk about and This is them calling out how they pay out of their own personal savings Now this is also a successful tech entrepreneur, but at some point You can't just run on One person funding it because if that person runs out of funds or decides they're bored with this and want to do something over their money Things have to change because they don't have a donation model or anything like that. Maybe they'll switch to that I don't know, but right now this is where telegram is at now telegram is here for a long time We began developing our apps for personal over eight years ago So they've been around for a while and the two things they mentioned here in short are introducing an ad platform And charging for premium services I'll leave links so you can read all the details on that But this is one of those fundamental things where you come back to how they're going to monetize. Well Premium services I think are not a bad thing People are so used to getting everything for free that it's a really tough sell That everyone just wants everything to be free on the internet And that is hard to get out of people that you should probably pay for something Unless you want them to turn into a surveillance capitalism model And the only way around it is to pay for services Running an ad platform. They promise not to do it in private conversations and certain ads over there But this is kind of the most common way that you can keep a service going for free So I don't you know question at all why they chose that as a potential for the way they want to run telegram Now I'll leave links so you can do all your reading on this But the last little fundamental thing I really need to hammer home is the tyranny of the default and what that means is My tech savvy audience watching this right now May have heard that statement before by Steve Gibson And yes, most people leave things at the default the tech savvy people and you are going why I always change the default settings That's fine. You know if you've engaged with the users the general masses who use a product They're going to leave everything at default Signal from end to end from the time you load it on your phone and you message someone else that is also using signal What do you do it from the desktop app or your phone? It is encrypted before it leaves the device And unencrypted at the device on the other side that is truly properly done end to end encryption With nobody in the middle hanging on to the keys where we're going We're just going to hold the keys for you and don't worry We won't use them unless we have a compelling reason to do so This is where telegram is different You can elevate your telegram conversation to be encrypted But it's not the default and this is also one of those fundamental things where you're just going to have a General audience of less secure users who seem that telegram can elevate and have a more secure conversation But will they Will they that's what we're really asking? I know you can but that doesn't necessarily mean you shouldn't use telegram Maybe you're someone who's more tech savvy who has no problem changing that Maybe you have a lot of friends on it and you want to use it and you like some of the other features Because telegram yes, I'm aware has many more features than signal including things like being able to share your location And find other telegram users near you which was recently kind of an interesting one I dug into when people were spoofing it to find people on telegram then that discussion I seen over on twitter was rather interesting. It's not hard to do You just change your gps location and lie to the application But either way kind of neat that they have that in here. They have very large public chat rooms This is not something signal is really designed for it's more of a one-to-one or one-to-a-few Communication app. I know it does scale a little higher than that But it's not in the same way that telegram does telegram trying to In some ways it feels a little bit more like when you look at their website be more of a social Application and things like that. I do like the little dancing and juggling ducks. They have on here But you know, this is different business models and just as long as you're aware of each one You're aware how these companies use the data. That's what matters to me last thing I'm going to mention. I have done a video before on key base Unfortunately zoom purchased key base and I was really hoping someone else would grab and run with the project and maybe like they would Plinard off and turn it into something or maybe the single foundation would Something along those lines would happen, but so far Nothing's happened. So for those asking about key base. I had the greatest of hopes for it It was a wonderful Platform, but unfortunately since zoom bought it and nothing's really happened on key base that yeah That one's dead. So I'm sorry for those of you that liked it because I was definitely among them that loved every feature They put in there, but unfortunately Yeah, I don't really have much faith in that application because I don't think there's been much it all happened with it Since zoom bought it. All right, I'll leave links to everything I talked about down below and thanks And thank you for making it to the end of the video If you like this video, please give it a thumbs up If you'd like to see more content from the channel hit the subscribe button and hit the bell icon If you like youtube to notify you when new videos come out If you'd like to hire us head over to laurance systems.com fill out our contact page And let us know what we can help you with and what projects you'd like us to work together on If you want to carry on the discussion head over to forums.laurancesystems.com Where we can carry on the discussion about this video other videos or other tech topics in general Even suggestions for new videos. They're accepted right there on our forums, which are free Also, if you like to help the channel in other ways head over to our affiliate page We have a lot of great tech offers for you and once again, thanks for watching and see you next time