All messengers have their own approach to protecting correspondence. Some store chat rooms on their own or others' servers in clear form, others only encrypt secret chat rooms, and some offer full encryption of all correspondence. Whose approach is more reasonable?.

Applications like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger offer end-to-end encryption (from the sender and recipient side), but their chats are restored when they sign in from another device. Correspondence is stored on company servers and can be restored by them at the request of law enforcement agencies or at will.

WhatsApp, Viber and Line can keep correspondence in plaintext in Apple iCloud and Google Drive, which means that it can be compromised when an Apple ID or Google account is compromised. These messengers give a false hope for security and they are suitable only for those who do not discuss in the correspondence any information that should be hidden from outsiders.

Telegram offers a different approach. Correspondence from regular chat rooms is stored on servers and can be restored by the user after the application is deleted or logged on to another device. Secret chat rooms assume complete anonymity, their backup is not provided, and if the user deletes such a chat, no one (including himself) can recover and read the correspondence. As stated by Telegram, even correspondence in regular chat rooms is distributed on servers in countries with different jurisdictions, which prevents its issuance to law enforcement agencies or special services of any one country.

Completely encrypted instant messengers (Signal, Wickr and Confide) do not make backup copies of chat rooms, so their users lose their entire correspondence history when changing their smartphone.

But worse - users of such niche messengers attract the attention of law enforcement agencies who understand that if they hide something, then they have something to hide, which means that they are engaged in something illegal. Correspondence in these messengers can not be intercepted, but one can look at confiscated smartphones.

It turns out that the messenger market is divided among themselves by three types of services: those that offer imaginary security, those in which one can conduct carefree correspondence and secret conversations, and those that are completely hidden from extraneous views and thereby attract attention to themselves.