Telegram Link Previews and Your Privacy

public Telegram's servers do the fetching

In an ordinary chat, your device does not go and load the page. It sends the address to Telegram, and Telegram's own infrastructure requests the page, reads the title, description and image the site publishes for exactly this purpose, and passes the card back to everybody in the conversation.

That has one consequence worth knowing, because it is the opposite of what people assume. The website sees a request from Telegram, not from you. Your address is not in its logs, and a link crafted specifically to record who looked at it records a visit from a data centre rather than from your home connection.

The same design means that when a widely shared article appears in thousands of conversations, the site is not visited thousands of times. The preview is fetched and reused, which is why a link posted in a busy channel does not act as a load test on the publisher.

None of that is a reason to be careless with links, and the next section says why. But the specific fear people have — that seeing a preview exposes them to whoever sent it — does not apply here.

lock The Secret Chat exception, stated plainly

Step 025 described the guarantee: in a Secret Chat, Telegram carries material it cannot read. Link previews are the one ordinary feature that sits awkwardly against that.

A preview card needs somebody to visit the page. If that somebody is Telegram's crawler, then the address — not the message, but the address — has been handed to the service you were specifically routing around. If it were your own device instead, the site itself would see your connection. There is no arrangement where a card appears and nothing leaves.

Telegram makes this a setting rather than a default, which is the right call, and the recommendation is simple: turn previews off in Secret Chats. You lose a picture. You keep the property that made the conversation worth having.

In ordinary chats none of this applies, because the address was already going through Telegram's servers as part of the message. There is nothing extra to protect, and the preview is a straightforward convenience.

photo_size_select_large The card is your message's illustration

Set the privacy question aside and there is a practical one underneath it, because the preview is often the largest thing in your message and you did not choose any part of it.

Before sending, the staging bar above the composer lets you change it: make the image large or small, move the card above or below your text, pick which link is previewed when there are several, or remove it entirely. Step 012 covered that bar; this is one of the things it is for.

Three situations where the default is wrong. A link you are citing in passing gets a full-width card that dominates a paragraph — make it small or remove it. A link that is the point of the message reads better with the card above your comment, so people see what it is before they read what you think. And a site with an unfortunate default image — a logo, a stock photograph, somebody's face — is better illustrated by nothing at all.

In a channel this matters more than in a chat, because the card is the visual identity of the post in a feed. Leaving it to whatever the destination site happens to publish is leaving your own presentation to somebody else.

touch_app Try it now — five minutes

One privacy check and three habits that improve every link you send.

1. Turn off link previews in Secret Chats In the privacy settings. If you never use Secret Chats this costs you nothing; if you do, it is the single item on this page with a security consequence.
2. Send yourself a link and try the preview controls Saved Messages is the place. Large card, small card, above, below, removed. Knowing the four states exist is most of the benefit.
3. Write one line with every link Where it goes and why. This is also the defence against the pattern covered in Step 052: a link whose visible text says one thing and whose destination is another.
4. Check how your own channel posts look If you run one, scroll your feed and see which posts are dominated by a card you never chose. That is worth five minutes of fixing.

alternate_email Telegram's own links preview differently

A link to a channel, a group or a specific message is still a link, but there is no outside website involved — Telegram builds the card from what it already knows.

For a public channel that produces a genuinely useful card: the name, the description and the picture, so people can see what they are being invited to before tapping. It is the closest thing the platform has to a business card, and it is one more reason the public description from Step 065 is worth writing properly.

A link to an individual message behaves differently, and the difference catches people out. It resolves only for somebody who can already see that chat. Send a colleague a link to a message in a private group they are not in, and they get nothing useful — no card, no content, no explanation. Step 012 made the same point from the other direction: a link is a location rather than a copy.

An invite link is a third case again. It previews as the room it opens, which means pasting one into a public place advertises the room to everybody who sees the message, not only to the person you meant. Step 023's controls exist for exactly that.

help Common questions at this stage