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What’s worse than a phone call?

A rambling 10-minute voicenote that could have been a two-minute voicenote if you had gone in with a game plan.

Don’t be that person.

I’m not going to list all of Telegram’s features (because Seth has already done that here), but one of them is the ability to double the speed a voicenote plays at.

This does not mean your rambling may continue unabated.

(You can follow 2oceansvibe on Telegram here, which we’ll be tinkering with in the days and weeks to come.)

If you have made the switch already, there is one feature you should certainly ensure is disabled, though, according to social media law expert Emma Sadleir.

She spoke with CapeTalk’s Pippa Hudson, and said the following:

As a default, your location is on when using Telegram… it’s scary because it allows you to chat with someone near you that you don’t know… It allows you to see nearby groups…

I picked up ‘Sluts of Randburg’ and all these groups… The most horrific pornography – and I’m hardy, I’ve seen it all… You see it without joining the group… Children are enquiring…

Uber needs your location. Telegram certainly doesn’t!

She also sent out the warning via Twitter yesterday:

I can’t tell you what I saw within two minutes of enabling it (and I’ve seen it all). Please share. WhatsApp is infinitely preferable to this. Better the devil you know. Pls share. 2/2

— Emma Sadleir (@EmmaSadleir) January 12, 2021

One of our staff members enabled location, and yeah, let’s just say Emma isn’t wrong on that front.

Although she does say that the default setting is on, which I’m not so sure about.

Still, it is worth making sure you don’t have this feature on, or warning others about it, and you’ll find a play-by-play of how that works here.

You can hear her full interview with Hudson below:

By the way, if you’re leaving WhatsApp and heading to Telegram or Signal for privacy reasons, you’re not starting from a clean slate.

As tech guru Alistair Fairweather points out in this interview, if you have the Facebook app on your phone, deleting WhatsApp will achieve little, and Facebook gets far more data from its own app and Instagram than it does from WhatsApp.

[source:capetalk]