The fact that telegram doesn’t use end to end encryption by default has been a bit hyped up and blown out of proportion I would personally say… for example riot.im doesn’t do that by default yet (in fact, I guess they’re actually sending plaintext by default?! or maybe at least ssl encryption) yet it’s still a very good im network.
not e2e encrypted though doesn’t mean the same as not encrypted, it just means that the server would theoretically be able to see your messages. And you can also use secret chats which are e2e encrypted.
Here’s a statement on this by someone associated with telegram: https://tgraph.io/Why-you-should-stop-reading-Gizmodo-right-now-Long
I think everyone should form their own opinion on the matter of e2e encryption. I personally trust telegram and I also trust that the cloud encryption protocol they’ve developed in-house is reasonably secure, you should just be aware that you should rather ideally use offline communication, strong pgp encryption or at least secret chats for stuff that you really want to keep a secret.
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