Telegram Chief Executive Pavel Durov said his messaging service has been handing over user data to authorities for years 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 article on his personal Telegram channel on Wednesday to clarify a message earlier that made it appear the company was changing its terms of service.
“My previous post may have seemed to announce a major change in how Telegram works. But in reality, little has changed”, said Durov in his latest communication.
Durov wrote that Telegram has been giving government authorities the IP addresses and phone numbers of suspected criminals since 2018.
“Every time we received a properly formed legal request through the relevant lines of communication, we would verify it and reveal 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 have not changed and that the company has always tried to comply with local laws “as long as they do not go against our values of freedom and privacy.”
“Telegram was built to protect activists and ordinary people from corrupt governments and corporations — we don’t allow criminals to abuse our platform or evade justice,” Durov wrote.
Durov has defended himself against accusations by the French government that he allowed criminal activity to go unhindered on his app.
In his first public comments last month since he was charged in late August, Durov said he was 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 the wrong approach,” Durov wrote in a Telegram post on September 5.
“Construction technology is difficult enough as it is. No innovator will ever build new tools if they know they can be held personally responsible for the potential abuse of those tools.”
While insisting that Telegram is not “some kind of anarchic paradise,” Durov said Telegram’s large number of users “caused growing pains that made it easier for criminals to abuse our platform.”
“That is why I have made it my personal goal to ensure that we significantly improve things in this regard. We have already started that process internally and I will share more details on our progress with you very soon,” he said.
The 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 investigation opened earlier this year.
Released on bail, Durov must report to a police station twice a week.
The tycoon of Russian origin has accumulated multiple citizenships, including the French one.
By postal wire
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