Unfortunately or fortunately, WhatsApp’s New Privacy Policy has helped Telegram to surpass the threshold of 500M Active Users (25 million new users joined Telegram in the last 72 hours alone). Telegram must give credits to WhatsApp’s New Privacy Policy to helping them to achieve this big hit in 2021. I think WhatsApp has given a new year gift to Telegram.
Telegram’s popularity surged in a matter of days. Instant messaging has welcomed 25 million users since the start of the week.
The Signal isn’t the only mobile app to experience momentum. Telegram has also been enjoying exceptional momentum in recent days, with a wave of registrations like instant messaging has certainly never seen in its existence. However, it remains to be seen whether all these newcomers will ultimately be regular users or whether they have only been passing through.
In a January 12 post, Telegram’s Twitter account says it has passed the 500 million active user mark. In three days, 25 million more Internet users have registered, mainly from Asia (38%), Europe (27%), and South America (21%). A small portion also arrives from the Middle East and the Maghreb (8%). The rest is not indicated by the company.
The success of Telegram for a few days. Allegory.
For those who do not know Telegram, this is a WhatsApp-like application. She is of Russian origin, created by the Durov brothers. It is an application whose source code is open, which is free, available on the main OS (in particular Android and iOS, but also on the computer), and whose interface is user-friendly and easy to learn.
Its main flaw is in the way it approaches communications security. Indeed, the most secure mode is not activated by default. You have to go to the application options to activate it for a conversation. This observation has also given rise to strong criticism from the designer of Signal, who considered Telegram inflated to qualify as secure messaging.
THE MISFORTUNES OF SOME MAKE THE HAPPINESS OF OTHERS
What caused such a jump? Obviously, as with Signal, it was the recent announcements for the WhatsApp app that was the trigger. Indeed, the Facebook subsidiary is warning the public that significant changes will occur on February 8, 2021, in terms of its conditions of use and its privacy policy.
Given the very degraded reputation of the American social network in terms of respect for private life and data confidentiality, the legal maneuvers of the community site on the mobile application are of legitimate concern, including on the European continent, which benefits from the shield of the General Regulation on the Protection of Personal Data (GDPR).
What emerges from the upcoming changes, which should be smaller in Europe, is that instant messaging will share information it has about its community with all of the other businesses owned by Facebook.
This decompartmentalization is not motivated by advertising reasons, for the time being, but aims to develop service solutions, so that third-party companies can exchange in a targeted manner with their customers on WhatsApp.
That being said, WhatsApp might not have been the only factor behind Telegram’s recent success. The cordon sanitaire deployed around the social network Parler, which no longer has the right to appear in the App Store and Google Play, as well as the hardening of the policy of other social networks in terms of moderation may have weighed in the balance. However, these two phenomena arguably weighed less than WhatsApp.
With this outcry that Facebook and WhatsApp have been facing for a few days, Telegram obviously laughs. On Twitter, the account manager did not resist mocking his direct competitor by posting well-felt memes to rejoice at his misfortunes, which he is inflicting on himself. Here are a few that you can see below.