Pavel Durov has said that Telegram users in “troubled countries” should enable two-factor authentication by creating passwords in order to prevent this. Login SMS messages are known to have been intercepted in Iran, Russia and Germany, possibly in coordination with phone or telecom companies. In April 2016, several Russian opposition members’ accounts were hijacked by intercepting the SMS messages used for login authorization.
Features
- Auto download settings can also be applied based on chat type such as group, channel or private.
- In terms of privacy, Telegram has offered secret chats that are end-to-end encrypted, have timers to self-destruct, and are also saved on the phone.
- Any Telegram user can join the affiliate program and be rewarded for referring others to the bot or mini app by receiving a commission from purchases made by the people they referred.
- For example, an article titled “Telegraph (blog platform)” published on 17 November would receive the URL /Telegraph-blog-platform-11-17.
- Security company Group-IB suggested SS7 mobile signalling protocol weaknesses, illegal usage of surveillance equipment, or telecom insider attacks.
- Nonetheless, in comparison with Telegram, WhatsApp is dependent on phone-based identity and local storage and does not allow using it on many devices independently.
Telegram made substantial efforts to ban illegal content such as child abuse and pro-terrorist channels, including a partnership with Europol to eliminate IS presence on the platform, but communities of far-right extremist users are still on the app. Telegram allows groups, bots and channels with a verified social media or Wikipedia page to be verified, but not individual user accounts. The same year, Telegram reportedly banned more than 350,000 bots and channels, including those that contained child abuse and terrorism-related content. Users can import chat history, including both messages and media, from WhatsApp, Line, and KakaoTalk due to data portability, making a new chat to hold the messages or adding them to an existing one. Telegram content is synced between users’ logged-in devices automatically through cloud storage, except for device-specific secret chats. Telegram’s FAQ page says it does not process requests related to illegal content in chats and group chats, and that “to this day, we have disclosed 0 bytes of user messages to third parties, including governments”.
Puerto Rico “Telegramgate”
A distinctive feature of this version is the ability to view channels/groups on a specific topic without censorship, which cannot be viewed from an app distributed from Google Play or the Apple Store due to their policies.citation needed For encrypted chats (branded as Secret Chats), Telegram uses a custom-built symmetric encryption scheme called MTProto. In October 2024, Telegram launched a verification platform, called Telegram Gateway, allowing third-party services to authenticate their users by sending verification codes via Telegram. In December 2020, Telegram launched a Bugs and Suggestions platform, where users can submit bug reports and suggestion cards for new features. The gateway sends users’ Telegram name, username, and profile picture to the website owner, while users’ phone number remains hidden. Telegraph natively supports Instant View, a feature which lets users read full articles in the chat with no load time and without opening an external browser.
- Such bots are used, among other things, to emulate and play old games in the app and inform users about vaccine availability for COVID-19.
- Signal is notorious for having a very conservative stance on privacy and security, and it attracts those users who prefer a minimum amount of metadata and end-to-end encryption at all scales.
- This makes it a quick and adaptable solution that operates seamlessly across various devices and work environments.
- Telegram has stated that the company will never serve advertisements in private chats.
- While mobile apps remain our primary communication tools, the web version of Telegram serves critical and distinct purposes for professionals, students, and frequent travelers.
Web Not Syncing with Mobile
Since 2017, Telegram users have been able to initiate one-on-one calls in private chats. Similarly, groups and channels can have content protection enabled, which prevents screenshots, forwarding and downloading of media. Premium users have the ability to set any chat folder as the default screen in the app while regular users will always see the full chat list when first opening the app.
Privacy and security features
Telegram also provides an open API for the creation of custom bots which can perform various tasks, integrate other services into Telegram chats, or work as mini apps or games. Both in Secret and regular chats, messages can self-destruct after they are read, disappearing for all parties after a period set by the user, ranging from one day to one year. Whether I was checking messages, accessing group chats, or managing multiple accounts, the experience was smooth and reliable. Even though this comes at the cost of convenience, Olvid has appealed to users wishing to have limited data exposure and stay out of centralized identity systems. Olvid does not have big channels, bots, or extensive social features but deals with small-group, private conversations. The National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine enforced the restrictions following evidence reported to them by Kyrylo Budanov, showing Russia’s ability to access messages and user data on the platform.
How to Use Telegram Web Login for Multiple Accounts with DICloak
Stickers are cloud-based, high-resolution images intended to provide more expressive emoji. The gateway is integrated with a bot, which is linked with the developer’s specific website domain. Bots power Telegram’s gaming platform, which utilizes HTML5, so games are loaded on-demand as needed, like ordinary webpages. When a user chooses to hide their profile photo, they can set an alternative “Public Profile Picture” that will be shown instead. Hiding the status obfuscates the exact time the user was online and hides the statuses of other people respectively. In April 2025, Telegram launched secure group calls with end-to-end encryption by using blockchain-like encryption technology.
In February 2018, Telegram launched their social login feature to its users, named Telegram Login. In July 2025, Telegram partnered with the rapper and media figure Snoop Dogg to release a set of limited edition collectible gifts alongside his music video “Gifts”. As of 2023, Telegram Premium can be acquired via in-app purchases facilitated by Apple and Google, directly via Telegram’s @PremiumBot, or with cryptocurrency on the Fragment platform.
The gateway sends the user’s Telegram name, username, and profile picture to the website owner, while the user’s phone number remains hidden. It features a website widget that can be embedded into websites, allowing users to sign into a third party website with their Telegram account. These platforms also enable businesses to add Telegram chat widget to their websites and gives them the option to automate conversations or let human agents reply. In April 2021, the Payments 2.0 upgrade enabled bot payments within any chat, using third-party services such as Sberbank, Tranzoo, Payme, CLICK, LiqPay and ECOMMPAY to process the credit card information. To activate an inline bot, a user must type the bot’s username and a query in the message field. The Dutch website Tweakers reported that an invited bot can potentially read all group Kiekka Casino messages, when the bot controller changes the access settings silently at a later point in time.