Settings, Devices lists everywhere your account is signed in: each phone, each computer, each browser tab, with where it was last used. Anything on that list can read your entire history.
It is the single most useful security screen in Telegram, it takes a minute to read, and most people have never opened it.
What you will be able to do
- check_circle See every session on your account and end any of them.
- check_circle Recognise one you do not want.
- check_circle Set old sessions to expire on their own.
- check_circle Limit what a new session is allowed to do.
Each entry names the app, the platform and where it was last active. Ending one takes effect immediately.
devices A session is full access
Because your history lives in the cloud, a signed-in session is not a window onto recent messages — it is the whole account. Every chat, every file, every group, from the beginning. A laptop left signed in at an old job has all of it.
That is the argument for reading this list occasionally rather than only after something goes wrong. It shows what each session is, roughly where it was last used, and lets you end any of them from any other one, instantly.
Ending a session logs that device out. It does not require access to the device, it does not warn whoever is holding it, and it works from your phone while the other machine is on the far side of the world.
Four things to do on this screen
The first takes a minute. The rest take seconds and never need doing again.
checklist What should be there
report A session you do not recognise
timer Letting old ones lapse
rule What a new login may do
Every session is the whole account. Read the list once, set the expiry, and it looks after itself.
settings The five-minute check
- Open Settings, then Devices The current session is listed first.
- Read every other entry App, platform, last used, roughly where.
- End anything you cannot explain It takes effect at once.
- Set sessions to expire after inactivity The setting is on the same screen.
- Turn on two-step verification if it is off This is the half that prevents rather than cures.
- Come back after lending a computer Or using a public one.
This page is the screen and what to do on it. The curriculum step goes deeper: how a session is established, what the entries can and cannot tell you, what to do when one is genuinely hostile, and how this fits with the rest of the account's defences.
At a glance
- 1See every session
Settings › Devices lists all signed-in devices.
- 2End unknown ones
Terminate any session you do not recognise.
- 3Auto-expire
Set inactive sessions to end on their own.
Updated
