Telegram CEO Pavel Durov said his messaging service has been handing over user data to authorities for years in order to crack down on criminal activity and that “little has changed” in the app’s privacy policies since his arrest.
The tech mogul who faces charges in France of facilitating child pornography and other offenses related to his lax content moderation policy posted an item on his personal Telegram channel on Wednesday to clarify an earlier message that made it appear the company was changing its terms of service.
“My previous post may have seemed to announce a major shift in how Telegram works. But in reality, little has changed,” Durov said in his most recent communication.
Durov wrote that Telegram has given IP addresses and phone numbers of alleged criminals to government authorities since 2018.
“Whenever we received a properly formed legal request via relevant communication lines, we would verify it and disclose the IP addresses/phone numbers of dangerous criminals,” Durov wrote in his latest message.
“This process had been in place long before last week.”
According to Durov, Telegram has complied with more than 200 legal requests from authorities in Brazil and nearly 7,000 in India this year alone.
He said that Telegram’s core principles haven’t changed and that the company has always sought to comply with local laws “as long as they didn’t go against our values of freedom and privacy.”
“Telegram was built to protect activists and ordinary people from corrupt governments and corporations — we do not allow criminals to abuse our platform or evade justice,” Durov wrote.
Durov has defended himself against French government accusations that he has allowed criminal activity to go unfettered on his app.
In his first public comments last month since he was charged in late August, Durov said he was being personally targeted by the French government.
“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,” Durov wrote in a Telegram post on Sept. 5.
“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.”
While insisting that Telegram is not “some sort of anarchic paradise,” Durov said surging numbers of Telegram users “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,” he said.
French allegations against Durov include that Telegram is used for child sexual abuse material and drug trafficking, and that the platform refused to share information or documents with investigators when required by law.
French investigators detained Durov at Le Bourget airport outside Paris in late August and questioned him for four days as part of a sweeping probe opened earlier this year.
Released on bail, Durov has to report to a police station twice a week.
The Russian-born mogul has amassed multiple citizenships, including French.
With Post Wires