wuffah

Not natively that I know of, but Telegram for iOS has the option when looking at someone’s profile. However, the Windows client does not.

Telegram for iOS lets you create “secret chats” but as far as I know other platforms have eliminated that functionality at the request of governments. And I would assume Apple technically controls the keys on device.

Assume the same for Telegram and pretty much any chat platform that controls your private keys.

Sexuality is a human right, and controlling sexuality is an authoritarian tactic to manufacture compliance.

“Age verification” is not just a tool for elimination of Internet privacy, it’s also a tool for sexual control.

It’s not a security flaw, it’s by design. Microsoft has been building this surveillance apparatus for years, and the purchase of government access to your computer and data using your tax dollars is a lucrative alignment of state and corporate power. Their recent design choices point to a rabid desperation to turn your PC into an Apple-style walled-garden.

It goes like this:

• Require online Microsoft account creation.

• Require TPM compliance to run Windows.

• Forcibly encrypt the user’s data under the guise of “security”, even without permission or even user action. (Encryption is good! Right?)

• Link your identity, payment information, data, online activity, and encryption keys to your hardware ID.

• Record everything you do and use that data to train an AI model with onboard tensor hardware.

• Exfiltrate the entire model, or just query it remotely for “online services.” Or, in this case, just have MS give you the fucking recovery keys. lol

All done “securely” with tamper resistance and mathematical verifiability that whatever is on your device is yours, and that you took that action with limited plausible deniability.

If you think you’ve got nothing to hide, think again about the current activities of ICE, law enforcement investigations based on reproductive health data, the pornography suppression movement, age verification, and the data harvesting of dissenting speech. What’s legal today can quickly become “illegal” tomorrow. The constitution is just a piece of paper in a fancy climate controlled box.