Telegram's Founder Pavel Durov Caves in to Authorities: It Will Now Share Phone Numbers and IP addresses of ‘Bad Actors’ to Authorities Who Request it - No Court Order Needed
Telegram's Founder Pavel Durov Caves in to Authorities: It Will Now Share Phone Numbers and IP addresses of ‘Bad Actors’ to Authorities Who Request it - No Court Order Needed
Telegram is an app that many use to connect “off-grid” and outside of mainstream media. It is not end-to-end encrypted like Signal and other apps, unless you use the “Secret Chat” feature. Therefore, Signal’s servers can read messages that are sent and received.
After Telegram founder Pavel Durov was reportedly lured into France by a dinner invitation offered by its President Emmanuel Jean-Michel Frédéric Macron, he was arrested and thrown in jail for failing to provide “back door” access to personal information of suspected individuals selling illegal merchandise. He was formally investigated for being complicit in allowing child porn distribution and drug sales on Telegram, as well as failing to comply with law enforcement requests. Official complaints include:
Here are our articles detailing what happened:
On August 24, 2024, Durov was arrested: HERE.
The next day, Rumble’s founder escaped from France: HERE.
Durov released on 5.4 million bail, confined to France: HERE.
The popular messaging service Telegram has updated its terms of service to discourage “bad actors” from “jeopardizing the integrity” of the platform, according to its founder Pavel Durov.
Durov said on Monday that Telegram will now disclose the IP addresses and phone numbers of users who violate the app’s rules to relevant authorities “in response to valid legal requests.”
Previously, Telegram had only committed to disclosing users' phone numbers and IP addresses if it received a court order confirming the user was suspected of terrorism. According to Telegram’s transparency report, that has never happened before.
The new policy applies to users suspected of any violation of Telegram’s rules. The company said that before disclosing user data, it will “conduct a legal analysis” of the request from the authorities. These measures will be “consistent across the world,” according to Durov.
The updated rules target, among others, users who abuse Telegram’s search feature to sell illegal goods.
“Telegram search is meant for finding friends and discovering news, not for promoting illegal goods,” Durov emphasized.
In recent weeks, Telegram moderators have used artificial intelligence to make the platform’s search feature “much safer,” and according to Durov the flagged problematic content has been made inaccessible.
Telegram’s new privacy policy comes as the Russia-born CEO is being formally investigated in France for a range of offenses, including complicity in facilitating the distribution of child pornography and drug sales on the platform.
Law enforcement and security researchers have extensively documented illegal activity on Telegram, including recruitment and organizing among extremist groups.
Following the investigation, Durov wrote on his Telegram channel that he aims to make his app “safer and stronger.”
“Telegram’s abrupt increase in user count to 950M caused growing pains that made it easier for criminals to abuse our platform,” Durov wrote. “That’s why I’ve made it my personal goal to ensure we significantly improve in this regard.”
Source: https://therecord.media/telegram-shares-ip-addresses-enforcement
Pavel Durov’s Telegram Channel
He has over 13 million followers:
Here is a post from September 5, 2024:
2. The French authorities had numerous ways to reach me to request assistance. As a French citizen, I was a frequent guest at the French consulate in Dubai. A while ago, when asked, I personally helped them establish a hotline with Telegram to deal with the threat of terrorism in France.
3. If a country is unhappy with an internet service, the established practice is to start a legal action against the service itself. Using laws from the pre-smartphone era to charge a CEO with crimes committed by third parties on the platform he manages is a misguided approach. Building technology is hard enough as it is. No innovator will ever build new tools if they know they can be personally held responsible for potential abuse of those tools.
Establishing the right balance between privacy and security is not easy. You have to reconcile privacy laws with law enforcement requirements, and local laws with EU laws. You have to take into account technological limitations. As a platform, you want your processes to be consistent globally, while also ensuring they are not abused in countries with weak rule of law. We’ve been committed to engaging with regulators to find the right balance. Yes, we stand by our principles: our experience is shaped by our mission to protect our users in authoritarian regimes. But we’ve always been open to dialogue.
Sometimes we can’t agree with a country’s regulator on the right balance between privacy and security. In those cases, we are ready to leave that country. We've done it many times. When Russia demanded we hand over “encryption keys” to enable surveillance, we refused — and Telegram got banned in Russia. When Iran demanded we block channels of peaceful protesters, we refused — and Telegram got banned in Iran. We are prepared to leave markets that aren’t compatible with our principles, because we are not doing this for money. We are driven by the intention to bring good and defend the basic rights of people, particularly in places where these rights are violated.
All of that does not mean Telegram is perfect. Even the fact that authorities could be confused by where to send requests is something that we should improve. But the claims in some media that Telegram is some sort of anarchic paradise are absolutely untrue. We take down millions of harmful posts and channels every day. We publish daily transparency reports (like this or this ). We have direct hotlines with NGOs to process urgent moderation requests faster.
However, we hear voices saying that it’s not enough. Telegram’s abrupt increase in user count to 950M caused growing pains that made it easier for criminals to abuse our platform. That’s why I made it my personal goal to ensure we significantly improve things in this regard. We’ve already started that process internally, and I will share more details on our progress with you very soon.
I hope that the events of August will result in making Telegram — and the social networking industry as a whole — safer and stronger. Thanks again for your love and memes 🙏
September 6, 2024 post:
Here is today’s only post, with almost 840,000 views:
WHAT I REALLY THINK
I would have done what I could to stop child trafficking, drug sales, and illegal merchandise sales. Freedom of speech is not meant to protect criminals.
Maybe it’s a slippery slope for authorities to find a personal IP address for a divorcing couple or otherwise abuse it, but I think they already know where we are and what we do online.
What do you think? Is this good or bad? I think it’s good.
One more in a long list of reasons to never use Telegram.
Thank you Margaret. For those keeping score at home, another victory for those opposed to freedom. You can't be 'sorta' for freedom any more than you can be 'sorta' pregnant! But, we're all human...'sorta'.