California’s secure messaging app, Signal, may be growing in popularity in the wake of the United States Capitol riots, but another messaging app, Telegram, is also seeing an increase in the number of users.
According to Reuters, citing data from Apptopia, the Telegram app has been downloaded 5.6 million times worldwide, from Wednesday to Sunday.
Like Signal, Telegram allows its users to send text, video and audio or image messages with symmetric 256-bit AES encryption. It is “one of the 10 most used applications in the world”, with more than 500 million active users, according to the company’s profile.
The website of the Telegram messaging app is seen on a computer screen in Beijing, Thursday, June 13, 2019. (AP Photo / Andy Wong)
WHAT TO KNOW ABOUT SIGNAL, THE SAFE MESSAGE APPLICATION THAT IS SURFING IN POPULARITY
Founded by Russian brothers and businessmen Nikolai and Pavel Durov, Telegram also doesn’t make money from ads, unlike other social networks, adding that it “will never” give third parties access to user data.
In an April blog post announcing the video call feature, Telegram, which clashed with the Securities and Exchange Commission after a cryptocurrency sale went awry, said more features and improvements, including group video calls, would be arriving at future.
“All video calls are protected with end-to-end encryption,” wrote Telegram, from Dubai, in a blog post. “To confirm your connection, compare the four emojis shown on the screen for you and your chat partner – if they match, your call will be 100% protected by time-tested encryption, also used in secret chats and voice calls of Telegram. “
The company benefited in large part because WhatsApp, a similar secure messaging app owned by Facebook, experienced a decline in the number of users, probably caused by new privacy terms.
The new terms, which came into effect recently, now state that WhatsApp can share certain information with Facebook, Instagram and Messenger. On Tuesday, Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, tried to defend the changes.
“Updating the policy * does not * affect the privacy of your messages with friends or family in any way,” tweeted Mosseri. “The changes are related to sending messages to a company on WhatsApp, which is optional”.
Telegram seemed to recognize the reason it was benefiting, tweeting the popular meme with two Spider-Man costumes pointing at each other, with their faces replaced by the Facebook and WhatsApp logos.
But, as with Signal, there may be limitations in using Telegram to send encrypted messages. End-to-end encryption can be limited if one of the parties is not using Telegram.
The application has also been analyzed by its user base. In 2017, Telegram may have been one of the sources of communication involved in the suicide bombing that killed 22 people at the end of an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, England.
Fox News contacted Telegram with a request for comment.
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