In a volte-face, Telegram CEO Pavel Durov announced that the made-in-Russia messaging platform will become a lot less cozy for criminals.
"We have updated our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy, ensuring they are consistent across the world,” Durov said. “We’ve made it clear that the IP addresses and phone numbers of those who violate our rules can be disclosed to relevant authorities in response to valid legal requests.”
A glance at current and past terms and conditions for the service, which offers private and public instant messaging, finds that the original fine print reads, "If Telegram receives a court order that confirms you're a terror suspect, we may disclose your IP address and phone number to the relevant authorities. So far, this has never happened."
This has now changed to:
"If Telegram receives a valid order from the relevant judicial authorities that confirms you're a suspect in a case involving criminal activities that violate the Telegram Terms of Service, we will perform a legal analysis of the request and may disclose your IP address and phone number to the relevant authorities."
As you can see, a shift from cooperating with terror investigations to criminal probes in general. This is fairly significant as Telegram pretty much billed itself as a haven for those avoiding government surveillance and investigations. It offer a degree of end-to-end encryption for its users – more on that below – and organized its IT infrastructure around the world to effectively resist handing over information about its users to the authorities, which made it a destination for all kinds of netizens, good and bad.
"We have disclosed zero bytes of user data to third parties, including governments" as the biz would put it in its documentation.
ProtonMail, another internet service that promotes itself as highly private, updated its Ts&Cs in 2021 after it handed over a suspect's IP address and other info to the cops upon request, which led to the arrest of a French climate activist.
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Durov also described how the business was attempting to clean up Telegram-hosted content that was discoverable via its search function – think people having conversations about and sharing media of highly illegal stuff that others can find and join. Over the "last few weeks," a team of moderators, supported by AI tools (of course) has been going through posts to find and block scumbags up to no good, Durov said, and he urged people to report illegal behavior on the service.
The phrase "last few weeks" could be telling here. In August, Durov was arrested in France after landing at Le Bourget airport. The multi-billionaire was held for days in jail before being charged with failure to cooperate with French law enforcement and allowing the use of his platform to facilitate trading in drugs and child sex abuse material, online harassment, and other crimes.
Durov – who co-founded the Russian social network VK with his brother; the pair left the service in 2014 to set up Telegram – was released on bail of €5 million, and he is not allowed to leave the country until the charges are settled one way or another.
And a week after his arrest, the South Korean government's telecom regulators approached the French for advice in dealing with the flood of deepfake porn that has become epidemic in the Asian country - and Telegram promptly apologized and began to curb that very content on its network.
Telegram, an LLC registered in the British Virgin Islands, does allow for full end-to-end encryption but only in so-called secret chat messages, not by default, and these can only be opened on specific devices. ®