Is Telegram safe to use?

For everyday convenience Telegram is reasonably safe, but as a *private* messenger it is weak by default: regular cloud chats are **not** end-to-end encrypted, so Telegram's servers (in Dubai, under a British Virgin Islands entity) can technically read and store them, and group chats and channels can *never* be E2EE. True end-to-end encryption exists only in opt-in one-to-one **Secret Chats**, which most users never enable and which don't work on desktop or sync across devices. Telegram's home-grown **MTProto** protocol has been repeatedly criticized by cryptographers for being non-standard and has never had a full independent audit of its live system. Since a **September 2024 privacy-policy change**, Telegram will disclose a suspect's IP address and phone number to law enforcement on a valid court order, and its own transparency reports show a sharp increase in fulfilled requests. Bottom line: fine for casual or public communication, but not a strong choice if your threat model includes the platform operator, server compromise, or legal compulsion — use Secret Chats at minimum, or a default-E2EE app for sensitive conversations.