"nobody seems to think about the logical implications that arise if we
consider a system like telegram not private enough."
Of course people have.
All of the usual issues with centralized services come up. It's the whole
"man in the middle" thing. The Telegram people know who has who added to
their contacts, how often the communicate, what is said (at least when using
ordinary chats. They claim that they can't when Secret Chats are used but,
since the backend source code is not available this cannot be independently
confirmed or denied that end-to-end encryption is actually used and that they
have no way to read them.) But even if they could, metadata is still metadata
and valuable in and of itself. All of the issues with it being a centralized
service alleviated by making it free software so that people can run their
own instance privately and keep that data to themselves. And if you want more
information on why decentralizing things is important, Eben Moglen gave a
great talk on that very issue:
http://www.softwarefreedom.org/news/2010/feb/08/audio-and-video-eben-moglens-talk-freedom-cloud-no/
I also have a blog which mentioned avoiding centralized services in part of
it: http://jxself.org/avoiding-surveillance.shtml
These are all issues to do with privacy, though, not software freedom. Of
course, people are free to do whatever they want. The whole point I'm trying
to make is that there are issues to consider here, when some in this thread
were totally dismissing the matter of where the backend lived, who ran it,
etc. as being totally unimportant and irrelevant things ("Why should I care"
etc.)
