Mozilla “sold their soul to Google”? What did I miss?

They sell AirTag location data? I honestly find that hard to believe. What’s your source on this other than big tech bad?

Yeah, it’s a feature on stock android. Should be in most android flavors

They won’t go to jail, period. No company owners never go to jail, kinda ever.

That’s absolutely not true. Sure, there are lots of cases where individuals have limited personal liability under their company, but this doesn’t mean no-one goes to jail for illegal business activity. In fact it happens all the time.

Please explain how Google would get my location if I don’t run a phone with Google location services and / or don’t allow Google services and apps to access my location. Sure, they may know where you are roughly based on your IP, but that’s just within a very broad region, and can easily be obfuscated by a VPN. Google siphons a shitton of information from everywhere they can, but it’s not like they’ve secretly implanted everyone with a tracking chip either… And neither can they get around any device’s OS-level location permission system.

Vast majority of people do, and on iOS and Android these days turning it “off” really just keeps it from connecting to peripherals. It’s still scanning even when “off”.

I would definitely accidentally wipe my phone haha

From a privacy POV, sure, not trying to argue that. Just saying that Telegram does have a bunch of features like that that wouldn’t really work if all chats were always E2E encrypted, so there’s a reason that it’s opt-in. Whether it’s a good one or not is up to you to decide for yourself.

Though I definitely think that Telegram could do a much better job explaining the trade-off, especially in a world where many major messengers are always e2e encrypted, and people somewhat expect it to be the default.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but even with double ratchet, retrieving and decrypting the message history is tricky / impossible, no? Afaik signal does allow you to receive new messages on multiple “linked devices”, but a new linked device doesn’t have access to any messaging history.

Tbf not all the chats being E2E encrypted is a UX compromise. It makes Telegram a lot nicer to use across devices and allows just accessing your messages from anywhere without needing your phone to be on. Plus no need to back up chats etc. because they’re all just on the server. As opposed to secret chats, which of course are bound to one particular device and can only be accessed from there.

I’m all for E2E by default but I must say I actually like the idea of having a choice in this particular case.

Google literally has an official list of IP ranges for their crawlers, complete with an API that returns the current IP ranges that you can use to automate a check. Hardly a moving target, and even if it is, it doesn’t matter if you know exactly where the target is at all times.