Telegram CEO Pavel Durov has damaged his silence almost two weeks after his arrest in France, stating the costs are misguided.
“If a country is unhappy with an internet service, the established practice is to start a legal action against the service itself,” Durov mentioned in a 600-word assertion on his Telegram account.
“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 was charged late final month for enabling numerous types of prison exercise on Telegram, together with drug trafficking and cash laundering, following a probe into an unnamed particular person’s distribution of kid sexual abuse materials.
He additionally highlighted the struggles to steadiness each privateness and safety, noting that Telegram is able to exit markets that are not suitable with its mission to “protect our users in authoritarian regimes.”
Durov additionally blamed “growing pains that made it easier for criminals to abuse our platform.” The favored messaging app just lately crossed 950 million month-to-month energetic customers.
“That’s why I made it my personal goal to ensure we significantly improve things in this regard,” he mentioned. “We’ve already started that process internally, and I will share more details on our progress with you very soon.”
The corporate has since up to date its FAQ to permit customers to report unlawful content material inside non-public and group chats by flagging it for overview utilizing a devoted “Report” button, a significant coverage shift and a characteristic that was beforehand off-limits.
Durov’s assertion, nevertheless, does not delve into the shortage of end-to-end encryption (E2EE) protections by default, which customers must explicitly allow in one-to-one chats.
“It is also a ‘cloud messenger,’ meaning that all messages live on Telegram’s servers rather than the user’s device,” Moxie Marlinspike, creator of the E2EE messaging app Sign, identified.
“With one query, the Russian Telegram team can get every message the French president has ever sent or received to his contacts, every message those contacts have ever sent or received to their contacts, every message those contacts’ contacts have ever sent or received, etc.”
Matthew Inexperienced, a safety researcher and an affiliate professor of laptop science at Johns Hopkins College, additional referred to as out the platform for making it an onerous course of that requires at the very least 4 clicks on Telegram’s iOS app.
“The feature is explicitly not turned on for the vast majority of conversations, and is only available for one-on-one conversations, and never for group chats with more than two people in them,” Inexperienced mentioned.
“As a kind of a weird bonus, activating end-to-end encryption in Telegram is oddly difficult for non-expert users to actually do. Secret Chats only works if your conversation partner happens to be online when you do this.”
