Telegram: Is It Safe To Send Pictures?

Sending pictures to our friends and family is quite common. But as to whether Telegram is safe for sending photos, there are lights and shadows.

Sending pictures to our loved ones has become very common. But there are many who often wonder if Telegram is safe to send photos.

Security is one of the hallmarks of Telegram. The instant messaging application has won over many of the users who came from WhatsApp precisely because the security holes in the Meta app made many users flee to other alternatives.

However, and despite this, at the moment we send a photo by any messaging app we always have some small risk.

The text messages we send via Telegram are perfectly encrypted, so that they are out of reach of hackers and the like. This is something that has been criticized even by governments, which have found in this security a problem for certain police operations.

But when it comes to images, things change. And is that many users have the application configured so that the photos that arrive are saved directly in the Gallery. And obviously once the image is in the Gallery of the receiver Telegram security systems no longer work. And if we have any spyware on our smartphone could have access to those images.

One way to avoid problems of this type is that we do not activate within Telegram the option Save to Gallery, which is the one that makes the photos are downloaded automatically. But not only we should have it disabled, but also the person to whom we send the images. The fewer traces we have of our photos on the phone, the greater our security will be.

Dangers Of Sending Photos On Telegram

• Hackers: As mentioned above, the main problem that we can find when sending photos by Telegram is that we have installed some spyware. This would make that at the moment we save an image in our gallery hackers could access it. And therefore could access all kinds of data that can be deduced from that photo.
• Dissemination of private images: The moment you send someone an image, you have totally lost control over it. That person can forward it to another person, who in turn can also disseminate it. So a situation could arise in which a private photo could end up circulating around the smartphones of half the city. Many cases of problems similar to these have already been detected, especially in the case of teenagers sending intimate photos to couples that end up being less lasting than they seem. Therefore, we must be very careful when sending certain photos.
• Extortion: Related to the previous danger, a person who has a private image of you may threaten to defund it if you do not do what he/she asks you to do. Many cases of extortion for money, and also in exchange for personal favors, have been reported.
• Photos with viruses: This risk exists especially if we forward memes that we have received. Some of the photos that are usually spread by Telegram groups have a virus associated with them that causes malware to be installed on our smartphone, which can be a problem. That is why we recommend that you never save in the internal storage of your phone any image that you are not clear where it has come from, as you could encounter big problems.

Photos saved in the cloud: If a photo of yours is sent by messaging, it is not completely deleted from the Internet for a long time, so regretting it and going back could be quite complicated.