"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."
That's just wrong. The data gets encrypted by the free client program so the
encryption mechanism is completely transparent.
You can read the code to verify that there is no "additional information"
which gets transmitted to the server and allows it to decrypt the message.
"I also have a blog which mentioned avoiding centralized services"
I agree that centrilized services *are* a problem, but I'm more concerned
about the big companies like google or apple.
Using telegram with encryption is a far inferiour problem than using gmail or
youtube.
