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 really simple. Use Signal or WIRE. Proton or maybe Tutanota for email.
Avoid garbage like Telegram and FB Messenger. Discord as well.
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.
It doesn’t exist. The devs said they won’t make clients sync by design. And that means I will never use SimpleX because its a required feature for me (and most other people).
Wire is better than those imho
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”
https://signal.org/bigbrother/northern-california-order/
It’s cool when these companies get subpoenaed. Then we all know exactly what data they keep.
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.
Matrix is still good too, right?
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)?
Does those apps have unlimited storage? Channel with unlimited subscribers? Or much more
It’s hardly simple: Why not Signal?
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!
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…
It is way better than Telegram