Telegram is owned by the same two people who founded the company in Russia back in 2013, Pavel Durov and his brother Nikolai.

Telegram is often grouped with Signal, another messaging app popular among those looking for a secure messaging solution.īut what is Telegram? How does it compare to WhatsApp and Signal? And how much should you be concerned by its previous controversies involving terrorists, far-right extremists, and revenge porn distributors? Let’s take a look. The service says it now has 500 million active users. In the wake of the WhatsApp controversy, the company, which pushes itself as a privacy-focused service that provides both one-on-one secure messaging as well as more social features like group chats, shared that it had gained 25 million (opens in a new tab) users over a 72-hour period in mid-January. Telegram has been around since 2013, but it's currently having a moment. Following a since delayed and confusing terms of service update that will allow WhatsApp to share your data with its parent company, privacy-concerned users are looking for alternatives. Are you looking to leave the Facebook-owned private messaging app WhatsApp?

What do people use telegram for