Crawling Telegram channels/groups and collecting public data is not so difficult due to the open ecosystem of Telegram: Anyone can run their own modified tg-cli.
Telegram needs to think about this, a fix could be something like the websites' robots.txt: An option to disallow crawler robots on the channel or group. But this will only work when good-intentioned developers flag their accounts as crawlers.
Another solution could be allowing the community to have an option to flag or report crawlers.
Maybe this little crawlers and robots are not going to hurt us right now, but how can we sure that the NSA, other agencies or corporations will not try to collect public communications and users data in order to log everything?
#crawlers #privacy
âšī¸ @geeksChannel
Telegram needs to think about this, a fix could be something like the websites' robots.txt: An option to disallow crawler robots on the channel or group. But this will only work when good-intentioned developers flag their accounts as crawlers.
Another solution could be allowing the community to have an option to flag or report crawlers.
Maybe this little crawlers and robots are not going to hurt us right now, but how can we sure that the NSA, other agencies or corporations will not try to collect public communications and users data in order to log everything?
#crawlers #privacy
âšī¸ @geeksChannel
We want to share with you this interesting text wrote by Jochem (a member of @geeksChat):
When you join a public group and post there: keep in mind that anyone can read this, even without joining the group. There is a minimal expectation of privacy in public groups, as they are essentially open to the outside world (this even includes scary entities like the NSA, because they also live on our planet).
The openness of Telegram's clients and API allows anyone to write a third-party tool to download and store chat history of any public and private groups they can access. While private groups are usually not accessible to anyone without an invite or invite link, public groups can be crawled easily without anyone noticing.
This does not mean the NSA is spying on Telegram users, and all anyone potentionally could see are: Your profile pictures; Your first and last name; The messages you and others posted in public groups. Private groups and chats are safe as always, as long as invite links are kept private. Secret chats can't be touched by crawlers.
#privacy #crawlers
When you join a public group and post there: keep in mind that anyone can read this, even without joining the group. There is a minimal expectation of privacy in public groups, as they are essentially open to the outside world (this even includes scary entities like the NSA, because they also live on our planet).
The openness of Telegram's clients and API allows anyone to write a third-party tool to download and store chat history of any public and private groups they can access. While private groups are usually not accessible to anyone without an invite or invite link, public groups can be crawled easily without anyone noticing.
This does not mean the NSA is spying on Telegram users, and all anyone potentionally could see are: Your profile pictures; Your first and last name; The messages you and others posted in public groups. Private groups and chats are safe as always, as long as invite links are kept private. Secret chats can't be touched by crawlers.
#privacy #crawlers