Telegram CEO Pavel Durov recently announced that Telegram would be handing over user data (such as phone numbers and IP adresses) to the authorities. Now it turns out that it has been doing so since 2018.
My previous post may have seemed to announce a major shift in how Telegram works. But in reality, little has changed.
Since 2018, Telegram has been able to disclose IP addresses/phone numbers of criminals to authorities, according to our Privacy Policy in most countries.
For example, in Brazil, we disclosed data for 75 legal requests in Q1 (January-March) 2024, 63 in Q2, and 65 in Q3. In India, our largest market, we satisfied 2461 legal requests in Q1, 2151 in Q2, and 2380 in Q3.
To reduce confusion, last week, we streamlined and unified our privacy policy across different countries.
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.
Full text of the post.
📰 My previous post may have seemed to announce a major shift in how Telegram works. But in reality, little has changed.
🌐 Since 2018, Telegram has been able to disclose IP addresses/phone numbers of criminals to authorities, according to our Privacy Policy in most countries.
⚖️ 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. This process had been in place long before last week.
🤖 Our @transparency bot demonstrates exactly that. This bot shows the number of processed requests for user data.
✉️ For example, in Brazil, we disclosed data for 75 legal requests in Q1 (January-March) 2024, 63 in Q2, and 65 in Q3. In India, our largest market, we satisfied 2461 legal requests in Q1, 2151 in Q2, and 2380 in Q3.
📈 In Europe, there was an uptick in the number of valid legal requests we received in Q3. This increase was caused by the fact that more EU authorities started to use the correct communication line for their requests, the one mandated by the EU DSA law. Information about this contact point has been publicly available to anyone who viewed the Telegram website or googled “Telegram EU address for law enforcement” since early 2024.
🤝 To reduce confusion, last week, we streamlined and unified our privacy policy across different countries. But our core principles haven’t changed. We’ve always strived to comply with relevant 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.
This is a wild admission. Not only does it show that Telegram completely betrayed all of their users, but it also reveals that they know about all the terrorism and child porn channels on their service, and deliberately didn’t delete them.
Good thing I never trusted it.
Implementing an in-house encryption was raising eyebrows already back then. No e2ee as default was also a red flag since it gives users without proper knowledge a false sense of security.
There was some privacy centered linux group that used Telegram that I thought I needed to follow, but noped out when they required a real phone number.
You mean they’ve lied all along?
I assume every single chat app is either a honey pot or is more than willing to hand over all logs to law enforcement. Anything advertising E2EE is basically saying “hey all you pedophiles and money launderers, have I got a data tracking app for you!”
I know you didn’t directly say it but it’s implied so I wanted to clarify.
telegram chat isn’t E2E, the only E2E on the platform is secret chats, which is only available to mobile users of the platform and not enabled by default. It does have client-server encryption but, in the terms of privacy that is worthless if you don’t trust the host (and it opens the host up to legal information requests as it has the capability of decrypting the messages)
No mobile platform is secure. Even EncroChat was broken.
ok this feels like a real hot take. but i am somewhat glad about this. in my country telegram has the reputation to be the nazi (and sometimes the pedo-) app. so i am not unhappy those people online activity can be used against them in court. That beeing said i can respect people who feel otherwise.
I’m with you. If they’re verifying the information request, as in vetting it to determine if there is actual criminal behavior going on i.e. pedos/money laundering/etc, then good. Hand them over to the authorities.
They state that they don’t cater to corrupt governments or organizations - good.
Everyone here arguing against these things are throwing up major red flags. Didn’t the CEO just go to court because he wasn’t handing over information willy nilly? I would hope Signal and Proton would be doing the same things.
I am not sure that this news relates to passing the content of telegram messages to any authority. If i read it correctly it is just about sharing personal information such as ip adress, phone number etc.
i do not get that from the resources provided here and havent heard about that either… the ip adress ect. is shared with authorities only, which i personaly dont disagree with per se. maybe i was unclear i my first coment about that tho.
If you got info about telegram sharing that info with private institutions, and are willing to share, id love to read that. that would make me deinstall the app rather quickly ^^
Pretty sure this is the same as every other messaging app - metadata is never protected information. The contents of the messages may be encrypted to some extent (which on Telegram they are, not end-to-end as with iMessage, but they’re not plain text), however your IP address, username, etc are subject to subpoena on any messaging platform.
Surprised pikachu face….
noone expected this
Everyone was told, from the outset , not to trust telegram. Amnesty International, the EFF, the cryptography community all said this as long as 10 years ago.
It’s actually pathetic to read a Russian talking about how it was “built for activists and not criminals “ . What a worm.
I know “security experts” from a top French bank who insisted on using telegram instead of signal. So even people who were supposed to stay informed about this stuff fell for the hype and marketing.
I don’t think Russians actually thought that. Its just that if they publicly pointed out the issues with Telegram and publicly suggested better alternatives, bad things would happen to them.
There are lots of things I could say to agree with you, but all I can do is gesture helplessly.
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.
Criminals according to what standard ? In some countries, activism or sympathy with a cause is considered criminal behavior.
Evade justice ?? What justice is he talking about? The justice of the United States of America, Chinese justice, or the justice of the nationalities he possesses?
Better to avoid this platform
Criminals like Edward Snowden I guess
As a Russian he should know better anyone the difference between an Activist and a criminal is one phone call from the FSB
You are 100% correct!
When governments are corrupt; rebellion is the same as criminal, because you are going against the government. That is the whole problem.
PoliScie 101.
Even the US founders hinted at this issue, if not outright called it out and added some protections for the plebs via a few amendments… But normies got nothing to hide 🤡
Criminals according to what standard ? In some countries, activism or sympathy with a cause is considered criminal behavior.
Exactly!
It is a slippery slope.
Even with services like Proton (big company in the privacy realm) etc, you can only fully trust yourself.
That’s why documents are always client side encrypted before I send my data, to any cloud platform.
Even with services like Proton (big company in the privacy realm) etc, you can only fully trust yourself.
That’s why documents are always client side encrypted before I send my data, to any cloud platform.
Exactly. I will never understand why people have their secret GPG-key on services like Tuta or Proton instead of on their own devices. 😂
Justice he dicides on and can get away with.
Why do you think they (and Signal) require phone numbers?
In terms of end-to-end encryption I don’t mind if they have my phone number or not, if it’s done right.
Let’s use signal for example, because honestly they do it pretty decently, the most information that you can obtain from signal in a data information request is the date and time that an account is created, and the last time the account went online.
Actual content such as the user’s contact list, the people that user was talking with(including groups), and of course the messages that you sent are fully end to end encrypted meaning that signal does not have access to it meaning that they cannot give that information out in a data information request as they never had it in the first place.
The most that signal is able to confirm in a data information request, is yes this specific account ID has a signal account and this is the last time they went online.
Are you mad? The phone number tells you what phone company to call. In most countries, that tells them your name and government ID.
The phone number is the thing that tells them everything about you.
and what is that going to give them? The information that they have is yes, they have an account, and that’s also saying that they used an actual number and not a VOIP number for registration. but if they are asking via phone number, they will already have that information at hand. They won’t get any information about what chats that number is part of, or even any info really at all, anything about the account is encrypted and not visible.
If they are able to provide my phone number without knowing the info you said there, there is some other leak already involved, and either way they won’t get anything but a “yes he has an account and he was last connected on X”
SimpleX
I’ve been calling this out for years.
And every time, some commenter goes, “Nu uh, look at their website bro! It’s super private!”
Nuh uh! We’ve been telling people to avoid Telegram and Signal for years!
This is really simple. Use Signal or WIRE. Proton or maybe Tutanota for email.
Avoid garbage like Telegram and FB Messenger. Discord as well.
There seems to be a gross misunderstanding of how everything works here. Any platform will need to provide data to authorities when “asked properly” - as in, receives an actual order from some enforcing body that has authority on the subject in question. No commercial company will fight the CIA in court to protect your data. The best you can hope for is that they minimize what kind of data they collect about you in the first place - in the case of E2EE, they will only have access to IPs and other metadata such as connection timestamps and nothing else. But all of the services you listed will collect at least IPs and most will do phone numbers as well. The only difference with Telegram is that they’re transparent about it. You can either avoid using commercial platforms altogether, or use them in a way such that data retrieved from them will be useless. But believing that “Signal will never give my IP to law enforcement” is delusional.
Proton had a recent subpeona they had to honor. All the data they had was yes, the dude has an email here. But no content. Granted, if you’re exchanging with a gmail account, it’s moot, for those exchanges anyway.
Signal just somehow forgets to store your IP address. So, their response will be “here are our logs, that phone number last time logged in yesterday, that’s all we got”
It’s cool when these companies get subpoenaed. Then we all know exactly what data they keep.
Does those apps have unlimited storage? Channel with unlimited subscribers? Or much more
Does this cup hold infinite water?
Would any?
I see a lot of people mention WIRE recently. Did everyone collectively forget how they sold out in 2019 and removed their canary (aka. compromised)?
In July 2019 Wire raised $8.2m investment from Morpheus Ventures and others. On July 18 of the same month, 100% of the company’s shares have been taken over by Wire Holdings Inc., Delaware, USA.
Wire isn’t that great. Definitely avoid email as it is riddled with problems that aren’t easily fixable despite what the email companies tell you.
Simplex Chat, Signal or possibly Matrix
I use Wire. Its the best option right now. Better than SimpleX, Signal, and Matrix for many reasons
It really isn’t though
It is less secure, less private and less user friendly and is run by a company who I question.
If you enter a phone number you’re already magnitudes less private
Simplex works without a phone number though.
So does Wire. The reason Wire is better than Signal and Telegram is privacy.
The reason Wire is better than SimpleX is usability. Namely, it has clients on all platforms, and the messages sync between all those devices.
That’s cool I’ll look into that, any alternative to a centralized service that requires phone number auth is appreciated and I think competition will make these apps only better.
I like SimpleX because you can self host, create hidden profiles and even throwaway invite links. What platforms are you missing for SimpleX? I think you can run it on Android, iPhone and through Fdroid plus you could even run it on Tails. I don’t really need interconnectivity so never tried it, but I think it exists.
Anyway, for me it really doesn’t matter, just stumbled upon SimpleX and liked it. But the more alternatives the better.
Wire is better than those imho
That’s the privacy starter pack.
Mid level is Linux, DeGoogled pbone, and openwrt on the router
Make your fed work for you! You pay him a healthy wage for it 🐸
GrapheneOS. Faraday bags. Depends on you and how far you want to take it. And how much you like and rely on dynamic maps.
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Nah, it senda tons of unencrypted data, and you literally can’t turn it off
It’s hardly simple: Why not Signal?
I hate signals take on anti federalism and that it forces you to have either iOS or realAndroid to set it up
Matrix is way better in that regard…
Articles like this go very far toward chasing people away from things that work and toward things that are dangerous.
Like Telegram.
Oh boy, I never read the entire thing, but they can decrypt quantum encrypted messages, if that’s true ( and I wish cryptography experts could debunk this ), if that’s true, then the NSA has went too far with this open source honeypot… perfection!
It is way better than Telegram
Never trust a third party to keep your shit private. Especially if privacy is their main selling point.
Foss code and client side encryption is fine.
If you can read and understand the code, sure. Otherwise you’re still just extending trust to someone perhaps less reputable than even the corporations who are dying to sell you out. For example, the back door some mysterious contributor slipped into xz recently.
My recommendation is to live life as if privacy on the internet did not exist, because it doesn’t.
There is such a thing as credibility. You can extend trust to others that have credibility. For example, security audits from companies that are credible. Or, you use an app because a trustworthy techie friend of yours says they’re safe.
But a prerequisite in all these cases is going to be FOSS code and client side encrypt.
Telegram had credibility. It was being used by journalists to protect sources.
You can extend trust to individuals but do not apply that to companies or organizations if you care at all about what they’re doing with what you give them. Not everyone has some mythical tech privacy wizard on call to give them perfect advice every time they open an account on an app or website.
Even client side encryption is not infallible. The algorithm you use will eventually be crackable and probably sooner than you think. Nothing lasts forever.
The most foolproof way to ensure something remains private is to not put it on the internet at all.
Fortunately we have folks like Freedom of the Press Foundation, who provide trainings to journalists
This doesn’t really compute. Society would collapse if nobody trusted “third parties”, and your second phrase is just hyperbole.
It’s more complex than that. The issue is money, and incentives, and how power is structured. A third party that you are paying or whose income is uncoupled to the profit motive, and preferably one that has both private and institutional stakeholders - well, if we choose not to trust them, then basically we can’t trust anyone for anything. That would be a dark place to be.
basically we can’t trust anyone for anyone. That would be a dark place to be.
Yes
Telegram was built to protect activists and ordinary people from corrupt governments and corporation
Didn’t they announce that they were no longer sending data to China about users participating in the Hong Kong unrest, implying that they were giving data.
