>you don't want a company to have your private messages

But that's not what he says.

>I don’t want to use any third-party fine-tuning services

He might be okay with a third-party storing his messages but not using them in their models etc.

This may sound stupid, but from my perspective renting random VMs on vast.ai is safe in general and might be safer than using traditional cloud providers in particular. Consider this: on your VM a new image starts several times a day, each time with a new volume. It downloads tens of GBs of data and weights for training. Once training is done, everything gets cleaned up and the process starts again for a new tenant. This constant cycle makes it kind of difficult to track and extract any meaningful data from it.

vast didn’t work for me despite installing their certificate on macOS.

In IM, there's a balance between total privacy and widespread use. Apps like Signal offer high privacy but have fewer users, while popular ones like WhatsApp are less secure. Telegram lies somewhere in between, offering a level of privacy that most users find comfortable. It's widely used and there haven't been significant incidents of legal issues arising from its messages. Ultimately, it boils down to whom you trust and which app has more of your contacts.

> like WhatsApp are less secure

WhatsApp uses end to end encryption by default. In fact, it uses the library that Signal developed. It is much more secure than Telegram, unless proved otherwise (which would need some backdoor in the application code to change its behavior).

It doesn't really matter if the app claims to use E2E when it actually discloses message content [0] [1]. WhatsApp is also filled with backdoors [2].

[0] https://therecord.media/fbi-document-shows-what-data-can-be-...

[1] https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/what...

[2] https://telegra.ph/Why-Using-WhatsApp-Is-Dangerous-01-30-4

0 and 1 don't support your claim that WhatsApp discloses message content. those two links explicitly say WhatsApp doesn't give messages to the FBI.

Also[2] claims backdoors, which is impossible to prove. They could just be bugs that were exploited (and fixed).

the fact that the iranian regime blocks telegram, messenger, instagram, signal, etc. but has no problem with whatsapp makes me worried that the app probably cooperates with the regime and complies with their data requests.