CEO of Telegram Pavel Durov today defended recent changes to his platform amid concerns that his arrest in France has made the messaging app more compliant with legal requests to share user data with authorities.
Durov has tried to minimize the significance of the changes made to the app since he was arrested in August and charged with complicity in a number of crimes, including distributing sexual images of children. He is banned from leaving France for six months and must report to a police station twice a week.
In his post, the 39-year-old indirectly addressed speculation that Telegram might step up its notoriously light content moderation as a result of his arrest. “Our basic principles have not changed,” Durov stressed in a post on the platform. “We have always sought to comply with relevant local laws – as long as they do not conflict with our values of freedom and privacy.”
He attributes a recent increase in the number of EU legal requests received and deemed valid by the app over the past few months to European authorities starting to use Telegram’s correct email address.
Then, in early September, Telegram quietly enabled users to report illegal content in private and group chats for moderators to review. Later that month, Durov also announced that Telegram had changed its terms of service to prevent misuse of the app by criminals and would share users’ locations in response to legal requests. “We have made it clear that the IP addresses and phone numbers of those who violate our policies may be disclosed to the appropriate authorities,” he said at the time.
Today, Durov framed these changes as technical. “From 2018 Telegram was able to reveal the IP addresses/phone numbers of criminals to the authorities,” he explained. Although he said last week that privacy policies across countries had been “unified”, he insisted that “little has actually changed”.
What has changed, however, is Durov’s tone. For years, Telegram cultivated an image of a proudly anti-authority platform that was politically neutral, while governments and digital rights groups complained about how difficult it was to contact its moderators.
Now there are signs that Durov is adopting a more conciliatory attitude towards the authorities. That sparked panic among some of the app’s less-savory users, including German extremists and Russian military bloggers, who expressed concern that the CEO’s arrest might be an attempt to access their data. Durov’s announcement today brings another warning to them. “We do not allow criminals to abuse our platform or evade justice,” he said.
