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Collaborating with Xitter is not the most distasteful thing Telegram has done. Its marketing model has been to consistently lie to people about being encrypted when that's only true in very limited cases. It has also catered to criminals by attempting to make it difficult to comply with legal demands for information, while holding that information for its own purposes.
Signal, on the other hand is always encrypted and does its best to hold as little information about users as possible.
What is there to learn? Every popular messaging app has pretty much the same UI.
Isn't it good for a communication company to be noncompliant with people's conversations?
Being unable to comply (signal) and selectively refusing to comply while still having access to the data (telegram) is not equivalent
"Selectively" is a new word that wasn't mentioned in the post I replied to. I get that it's better to not have access to the data at all, and lying to customers is shitty, etc. I use signal and not telegram. But 'refusing to comply with demands from other groups for data access is correct behavior' was my only argument. Nothing about equivalence
It might be correct behavior but when there are laws in place to force the company to comply, actually having the data is a problem.
It usually wasn't conversations that were at issue. People would engage in criminals acts, such as trading child sexual abuse media in large unencrypted group chats. Law enforcement would find links to those chats, join them, and observe criminal acts, leading to court orders to Telegram to disclose whatever identifying information it had about the offenders, such as phone numbers and IP addresses.
Telegram intentionally split storage of that kind of information across jurisdictions that do not cooperate so that it was effectively impossible to obtain orders for all of them. They bragged their marketing materials that they have never complied with a court order for user information. Taken as a whole, I see that as intentionally facilitating child abuse.
Signal's approach is pretty much the inverse; rather than hoard data about users and shield people they know have done evil, Signal has ensured that it does not know the contents of any conversation, nor anything about users other than when they created the account and most recently accessed it.
IIRC Signal stated that they can collect IPs of some users if asked by a judge but that's about it (not retroactively). Which imo also further proves that they actually value privacy without using it as an excuse to make money from people doing truly evil shit