So, i remember long ago, bot api allowed to create

contact cards using the phone number and If the bot had "seen" the user you had a contact card linked to a real telegram account.
Quite handy but also prune to miss use... i think it got deleted for bots..


Now, as for the rumours, there will be a way to use a phone number as a link. I assume just like it happens in whatsapp. But that would mean that mtproto would need a way to solve that phone number into an account...

Can someone explain a little more about this new "links", how it could affect users, how it could affect how bots create links to users by phone number...

Someone knows?

>But that would mean that mtproto would need a way to solve that phone number into an account... mtproto already has that since the beginning already. How else would you initially get your contacts on Telegram based on your phone book?

>how it could affect users, how it could affect how bots create links to users by phone number... I don't see any change in how anyone would be affected. Basically these links are just about the same as using the phone number only, no?

It got tweaked many times so you can't abuse it by putting phones that autoresolves to users. Either way, even if there is a way to link phone numbers to accounts. Bots are not allowed to do it. For security reasons i assume. Even then you need new methods to solve and process the links.

So you now can create lists of phone numbers and click them to see if anyone has an account? Is it now that easy?

Again: I am assuming that both links and adding new contacts use the same mtproto API endpoint for resolving phone numbers to accounts. So the exact same limits and restrictions apply. So exactly nothing changes. Where's the problem?

For using the phone number you need to have it as contact. For security reasons.. also you Have a limit on how many contacts you can add to 1 account.

The same privacy settings apply. Example: consider the two links http://t.me/+42490 will resolve to user with id: 490000 http://t.me/+424314159 but will raise PHONE_NOT_OCCUPIED errors.

Also this

How do Telegram determine when to show or not a phone number and link to an account?

Privacy settings > who can see my phone number

hehe nice

https://t.me/tgbeta/4551

Shrimadhav U K
based on this setting, i guess.

So new users and newbs will not have that option enabled by default? So, there is a potential missuse, like the one that happened some years ago where the iranian goverment added 15 Million phone numbers as contacts to 1 account to resolve user info and link user_id to a phone number. But now the iranian gov would be able to create just large lists of phone numbers and do the same way easier?

That's not completely true tho. It wasn't 15 Million in one account. Telegram had a limit of (i think) 2k contacts per account. No idea if that changed. But I think they changed import rates for phone numbers.

They added, back then, a limit to 5k contacts after that. Not sure if they reduced it now to 2k

The limits were in place even before that Iranian "attack". They weren't added just then iirc.

"But now the iranian gov would be able to create just large lists of phone numbers and do the same way easier?" No, as I tried to say multiple times: you can create unlimited links, yes. But matching the links/phone numbers to a user profile is basically the same as adding them to your contacts. It uses the same mtproto lookup endpoint and hence the exact same restrictions apply.

No. There is a new method, in the new layers.

Wow, nice, resolved peer has a new vector called users! Dude i remember in 2016 and only on telegram-cli client there was a method to see users that had 2 or more contacts in common with you.