Despite being the most popular messaging service in the world, WhatsApp has always been filled with anxiety about its competitors. To the extent that its officials are diligent in attacking competitors' instant messaging services.
A few months ago Mark Zuckerberg touched on iMessage. He said WhatsApp was safer than Apple's messaging service.
Now it's the turn of the WhatsApp boss, Will Cathcart, to criticize Telegram. He cited an article by Wired and criticized him about Telegram's implementation of end-to-end encryption (E2EE).
According to him, Telegram's encryption has not been independently verified. Not only that, Cathcart mentions another weakness of this messaging service made by Pavel Durov.
"Telegram lacks the real transparency adopted by most tech companies. Apart from not securing people's messages, Telegram's mistakes have put people at risk," Cathcart wrote on his Twitter account.
He also considered that apart from not securing people's messages, Telegram's mistakes had endangered people. They've built another API that seems to allow access to user content for mass surveillance.
"Telegram's privacy policy still claims they have never handed over user data to the government, but news reports suggest otherwise. So why do they continue to claim this? https:// telegram.org/privacy (see 8.3)," Cathcart said.
Cathcart realized that his tweet could be seen as related to the competition between WhatsApp and Telegram. However, he tried to deny this by mentioning that there are many end-to-end encrypted messaging applications other than WhatsApp that can be used.
"If you're not going to use WhatsApp, use one - don't use Telegram," he concluded.
Reported by GSM Arena, the Telegram team had previously launched its own criticism of WhatsApp. For one thing, the option to back up chats to Google Drive effectively disables encryption. Since backups are not encrypted, government agencies can petition Google for the data, not WhatsApp.
Of course, it is in both parties' interests to claim that their services are superior to the other