[Littlemaster]

Hello everyone,
I need to know how safe is our telegram bots are? I need to set a welcome text in a particular group, which will send terms and rules of group to the new joined user.
This group is of teachers who are going to be in government schools. That means they will be much concerned about their privacy. I think teachers take care of each points, so criticism will come. They fear hacking. Let me know the safest way to do this.

[mzltest]

Hello everyone,
I need to know how safe is our telegram bots are? I need to set a welcome text in a particular group, which will send terms and rules of group to the new joined user.
This group is of teachers who are going to be in government schools. That means they will be much concerned about their privacy. I think teachers take care of each points, so criticism will come. They fear hacking. Let me know the safest way to do this.

As you are very concerned about the privacy,the best way is probably making one yourself using the API,so you have full coontrol.

Bots also have a privacy mode that only mentions and service messages will be sent to the bot to process thus on most occasion privacy mode is just fine (but not for admin bots), however if you have concerns regarding the bot having user ids for new members,making a simple one yourself.

[sagher]

I have same issue with Telegram, i use it since 6 months ago when a whatsapp privacy issue leaked. and after few months i saw that i automatically added in some virtual groups and some has chat enabled and some only a broadcast group. even i will not share my number to anyone.
API is also enabled.

[tbelldesignco]

If you are worried about security, I would maybe move away from Telegram and look at Discord, using your server here you can create bots and such and from my experience the platform is one of the most secure on the market. We use it for work, along with Slack. I have been trying to move away from Telegram and WhatsApp as a whole, just with some of the security vulnerabilities that were pointed out during the January 6 incident in the US and some other things I have seen here and there on reddit and such.

[Kururin]

Uhm Discord is not the best company for privacy. They fully search around servers and if they find something that will violate their Terms of Service, they will shut it down. I would say stay away from Discord and use something like Signal. I am not sure about Slack but they are mostly same as Discord.

[tbelldesignco]

Uhm Discord is not the best company for privacy. They fully search around servers and if they find something that will violate their Terms of Service, they will shut it down. I would say stay away from Discord and use something like Signal. I am not sure about Slack but they are mostly same as Discord.

I mean a TOS is a TOS, violation deserves administrative action and I find that to not be true fully. There are servers with full blown predatory behavior and they don't get shutdown. I was also merely talking about privacy concerns from the outside. Data leaks, user data leaks etc.

[mzltest]

I was also merely talking about privacy concerns from the outside. Data leaks, user data leaks etc.

Then no company should be safe unless you have your own solutions.

No matter Discord,or Telegram you shouldn't really sending sensitive information as long as their servers stores your chat history (and I am wondering if they use encryption,they must have some techniques to decrypt them to respond to policy violation,or fully dependent on report feature that only send what is visible to reporter) for becoming a good target of cyber attacks.So no absolutely safe solution.

There are tools that encrypt messages on your own like UEncrypt but that requires the other person in your chat use that tool and have your public key,and for the safest practice the process of exchanging keys need to be a face-to-face task.

[tiwil]

I have same issue with Telegram, i use it since 6 months ago when a whatsapp privacy issue leaked. and after few months i saw that i automatically added in some virtual groups and some has chat enabled and some only a broadcast group.  even i will not share my number to anyone.
API is also enabled.

This happened because you're in a group where inviter is also in that group. Therefore they can add you to their group by searching their name. I believe this is done automatically though.

Anyway, if you set your username, it's available for public to search for it. If you want full privacy then you can turn off your username. But in this case, if you're joining public group, there is still a chance where you will get invited to unknown group.

---

Hello everyone,
I need to know how safe is our telegram bots are? I need to set a welcome text in a particular group, which will send terms and rules of group to the new joined user.
This group is of teachers who are going to be in government schools. That means they will be much concerned about their privacy. I think teachers take care of each points, so criticism will come. They fear hacking. Let me know the safest way to do this.

If I may know further, what kind of hacking they fear? I mean, Telegram is completely safe since it uses phone number for login purpose, so if you have your number then you're safe. If you say you don't want stranger to join your group then deactivate the link and manually add them.

Until now, I haven't get any kind of hacking activites in my account though.

[mzltest]

This happened because you're in a group where inviter is also in that group. Therefore they can add you to their group by searching their name. I believe this is done automatically though.

Anyway, if you set your username, it's available for public to search for it. If you want full privacy then you can turn off your username. But in this case, if you're joining public group, there is still a chance where you will get invited to unknown group.

I just used telegram and wondering did the inviter to be one of your contact to be able to invite you to another group?As far as I know there is no way for a group member to add other member to another group even I was the group admin.
But yes,when someone invites you it is looks like to be automatically joining.

---

If I may know further, what kind of hacking they fear? I mean, Telegram is completely safe since it uses phone number for login purpose, so if you have your number then you're safe. If you say you don't want stranger to join your group then deactivate the link and manually add them.

Until now, I haven't get any kind of hacking activites in my account though.

I think they are not mainly expressing concern to platform but to the bots gathering user information or chat info as these bots will listen to /commands and that might mean bots can get access to chat data which might be sensitive (though there is privacy mode---BTW how can group owner/admins activate that for the robots? I know when it was activated in the bot profile says have no access to messages) in  platform is 100% safe and transparent unless you host your own solution.And that's why I suggested if he is still concerned then build one himself.

[tiwil]

I just used telegram and wondering did the inviter to be one of your contact to be able to invite you to another group?As far as I know there is no way for a group member to add other member to another group even I was the group admin.
But yes,when someone invites you it is looks like to be automatically joining.

I'm a little bit miss here. Inviter doesn't need to be in our contact (phone contact) to invite us to a group. They simply will search for your profile and boom, you're in.

I think they are not mainly expressing concern to platform but to the bots gathering user information or chat info as these bots will listen to /commands and that might mean bots can get access to chat data which might be sensitive (though there is privacy mode---BTW how can group owner/admins activate that for the robots? I know when it was activated in the bot profile says have no access to messages) in  platform is 100% safe and transparent unless you host your own solution.And that's why I suggested if he is still concerned then build one himself.

Group owner cannot activate privacy mode for a bot. You can check if it's in privacy mode or not by simply checking if he can access message or not (as you said). If not then privacy mode is activated.

In order for bot to welcome a user, its privacy mode must be turned off. So I guess if you're afraid of info stealing, better double check the bot (make sure to use bot with high reputation) or just build your own bot from scratch. It's easy and fast, you can do it with Python