Pavel Durov, the founder and CEO of Telegram, says that the company has been giving police information about its users since 2018. The chat app, which is known for being safe for crypto, has shared the IP addresses and phone numbers of criminal users for years because the police have asked them to.
Durov went on his Telegram channel on October 2 to explain a recent post about how the platform shares data. He made it clear that these rules had been in place for a long time before the current news. “My previous post may have seemed like a major change, but in reality, very little has changed,” he said.
As required by law, Telegram has shared data when asked to do so since 2018. This is true in most countries. Durov says that whenever they get properly filed legal requests, they check the information and give it to the right people to help with illegal cases.
He talked about Telegram’s Transparency Bot, which shows how many requests the company gets from different countries. In Brazil, for example, Telegram did handle 75 court requests in the first quarter of 2024, 63 in the second, and 65 in the third. Indian users made thousands of requests every quarter on Telegram’s app, which is its biggest market.
Durov went on to say that Telegram’s core values of privacy and freedom have not changed, even though the information was leaked. The platform continues to shield activists and regular users from unfair governments and businesses, but thieves are still not allowed to use the app to avoid being caught.
The news about Telegram’s rules on sharing data comes after Durov was charged by French officials in late August with helping illegal activities happen on the platform. After being released on bail in early September, Durov has talked about the accusations and kept app users up to date on the company’s efforts to stop illegal actions.
Even with these explanations, there are still worries in the crypto world. Sharing IP addresses and phone numbers worries a lot of users, especially those who work in the Web3 space, because it could hurt privacy and freedom, which are two important ideas in the crypto world. Despite this, Telegram says that its practices have not changed and that it is still committed to protecting user privacy while following the law.
