Telegram 101: How to communicate Securely in Telegram?

It’s no secret anymore that we are living in age of highly sophisticated government or big firms’ surveillance from everyday life of ordinary citizens; and political and social activism is even further their prime target.

We came a long way and learned a lot since Iran’s 2009 Green Movement days that twitter was the go-to app for protesters; that how online practices can be tracked and possibly put peoples' live at detrimental danger. A lot has changed since that time, and new tools came to existence which helped in transitioning of protests and activism towards leaderless decentralized movements like ones in Hong Kong lately, and also Iran and Russia and in many other oppressive states.

Telegram messaging app, which is funded and owned by a libertarian Russian who left his home nation over opposing the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) request to hand over encryption keys. Telegram also refused to hand over user data or moving servers per Iranian government request to decipher to conversation of it’s 50 Million nationals who use the service just for the aim of protesting government restrictions on freedom of expression. Now the platform is blocked in aforementioned nations, as well as handful of other nations with authoritarian governments in the region.

Though Telegram proved to be useful and passed security tests in protests times, still there are more features in it to add more layers to security of your communications while using the app. We go in details about those stuff in following, we assume that you already set passcode locks and two-step verification first and foremost. If you wish to find out about other general useful features of this app you might want to visit a brief listing of all of its features.

If you had any questions, you can either contact Telegram’s Twitter support (twitter), or join the discussion at (Telegram Android Talk Group) or to me at (@karim101telegram)

1. Set 1-minute or shorter timer for destruction of your secret chats

Use secret chats for your very important chats, since it has E2EE by default and self-destruction timers and disabled forwarding, screenshot, and screen recording. But remember to set the timer below 1 min, that’s an assuring trick.

2. You can delete any message or an entire chat from your or even recipient’s device with no time limit

On the other hand, cloud chats are encrypted between client-server-server-client, so one should put trust on Telegram for their shared data. Till this date, there was no report of data breaches or 0 bytes of information compromising. The good side of these chats are that you can save unlimited amount of data (each file up to size of 1.5 GB) in their server, and meanwhile clearing media from your local device to avoid police interrogation or misuse of that.

- You can delete a single message or an entire chat history not only for yourself, but also the recipient side in seconds. It will be helpful on unfortunate cases.

3. Telegram supports multiple account simultaneous use, separate your personal chats from those public ones

4. If possible, use Virtual Numbers for your public account, so in case of leaking it no one can trace back to your real-life identity

5. set ‘who can find and Identify you in Telegram using your number’ to your own contacts!

Last year in Hong Kong after Telegram becoming the main tool of protesters, police started adding masses of phone numbers as contact (though it is limited by Telegram how many contacts can be added per a single time) and this way they could infiltrate into protest groups and surveilled what other people are saying and could arrest some of those who had their identities revealed.

It is advised that you should prohibit new users from finding/identifying your account unless they are your trusted contacts.

6. Add contacts without saving number

By default, Telegram hides the phone number and you can only see their public username if they set one. It’s possible to save one as telegram contact even if they don’t make their phone public or even don’t have username. Note that by doing so, you’d make your phone number visible to them, but their number won’t be visible unless they save you as contact mutually. I still recommend not adding people as contact unless you are pretty sure about taking the risks.

You do not need to share phone number to contact one in telegram. Just share or ask for usernames (such as @karim101telegram) or their profile link (t.me/karim101telegram). It adds to privacy of your account too, because you can change it anytime you wish.

8. Always make sure that you are logged out of vulnerable sessions

Since telegram is a multi-device platform, it is always wise to manage your active sessions. for example, you have a computer at home and it’s also logged in with your Telegram account, if that is vulnerable to be attacks you better sign out from such devices.

9. Set your last seen visible to nobody, though you can add peoples and groups as exception

10. Hide your profile photo from public or even contacts

11. Disable Profile linking to forwarded messages of you to avoid any abuse or possible identification

To make your privacy complete, we’ve also introduced a way to restrict who can forward your messages. When this setting is enabled, your forwarded messages will no longer lead back to your account — they'll just display an unclickable name in the “from” field. This way people you chat with will have no verifiable proof you ever sent them anything.

12. Limit who can add you into groups

13. Clear Call Logs and Unnecessary Chats (at least from your own side)

14. Use telegra.ph platform for creating blog posts where you can either log in (for later editing) or you can share it anonymously just by forwarding the link. The generated blogs can open as Instant View pages inside telegram or it can be accessed by web browser.

Stay tuned to https://t.me/telegram for all the news and updates.

Read about all the features of the app.