Secret Chats. Create additional one-on-one chats with your contacts that use end-to-end encryption and are not stored in or synced with the cloud – only locally on the two participating devices.

Secret Chats are device and session-specific, meaning they don’t appear on a user’s other devices, and will be cancelled if one of the participants logs out.

These chats prevent forwarding messages and have extra privacy features – like a self-destruct timer that erases messages after they are read, as well as screenshot alerts on iOS and screenshot blocking on Android. You can identify Secret Chats from the icon in the header and on the chat list.

End-to-end encryption is provided by Telegram’s MTProto 2.0 protocol, which has been independently verified by thousands of researchers.